Debt Crisis Highlights I.M.F.’s Renewed Role (NYT)
By SEWELL CHAN
Published: November 26, 2010
WASHINGTON — Ireland’s reluctant acceptance of a bailout supported by the International Monetary Fund is the latest in a string of developments since 2007 that have thrust the monetary fund into a new position of authority and prominence.
Daniel Roland/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Dominique Strauss-Kahn has led the I.M.F. since 2007. His successor may, for the first time in the fund's history, be someone who is neither from Europe nor North America.
The fund, which earlier in the decade seemed dormant and even irrelevant, is back in a big way. This year alone, it has inaugurated loan packages or credit lines to Colombia, El Salvador, Greece, Jamaica, Mexico, Poland and Ukraine, among others. As Ireland joins the list, many investors are raising questions about Portugal and Spain.
The biggest economies have turned to the monetary fund to monitor the trade imbalances and currency tensions that threaten global cooperation. The fund is lecturing Europe — the Continent whose devastation led to its creation in 1944 — on the need for economic changes. Its bungling of the Asian financial crisis of 1997-98, widely regarded as a low point that soured emerging markets on the monetary fund, has been seemingly forgiven, if not forgotten.
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