There has been much discussion of the qualifications and nationality of the next head of the International Monetary Fund. This talk is insufficiently ambitious. The fund’s next head must be a genuine economic architect capable of helping to design an entirely new international monetary framework.
The defining truth of our time is that the US-led international order – the one that gave birth to the IMF – is over. The problems in Greece, Ireland and Portugal are serious, but Europe can largely manage them itself. The IMF’s new leader must be chosen to address longer-term and more complex global challenges.
The end of the cold war was widely expected to result in stronger global leadership. Instead the period has been marked by rising financial instability, an explosion of tax evasion and corruption, and a ludicrous breakdown of policymaking in the US – where politicians now spend 90 per cent of their time fundraising and campaigning and only 10 per cent of it governing.