…not because of quality of candidates, but anachronistic policies of Fund
President Bharrat Jagdeo said Guyana supported Governor of Mexico’s Central Bank, Agustin Carstens, for the post of International Monetary Fund (IMF) managing director, but the Chair, through which countries of this region speak – Brazil – lent its support to France’s Christine Lagarde, the race’s eventual winner. He made it clear that the support for the Mexican candidate had nothing to do with Lagarde as a candidate in terms of her suitability for the post. He said it is because the IMF still holds on to anachronistic practices instead of realising that the world has changed since the post war era, when the organization was created.
Speaking at a press conference at the Office of the President yesterday, he said several other countries in the constituency supported Carstens, including Colombia and Suriname. “But we have one Chair that we speak through – Brazil – and they supported Lagarde,” he said.
“In the statement to the Board, the Chair made it clear that there were several countries in the constituency that supported Carstens,” he said.
“Now, I know Christine Lagarde. I worked with her. She was a member of the UN High Level Committee on Climate Change Financing, the small group that the UN Secretary General put together to try to raise US$100 billion per year by 2020 for climate financing,” he said.
“As I said before, publicly, she is a good candidate. She had some strong positions that I was very supportive of. For example, a tax on financial transactions that the US did not support. She supported that – the so called Tobin tax,” he said.
He explained that Guyana’s choice to support Carstens’ candidacy for the IMF top position had nothing to do with the quality of the candidate. “She was a good candidate, just as good as Carstens. The problem was that we have always argued that this issue should be determined not on some historic agreement that they had in the post-Second World War period, that Europe would have the Managing Directorship of the IMF, while America had the Presidency of the World Bank,” he said. “This is anachronistic. France today has had five or six managing directors [of the IMF]. France is a tiny part of China’s economy [by comparison]. The world has changed enormously, and while we had this opportunity, I thought what we should have done was to really make a significant attempt to change it”, he said.
“Sometimes, in the developing world, we argue for greater transparency, legitimacy, and more representative shareholding in these institutions; and in this case we had a chance to break a long term trend and we did not use the opportunity,” the president said.
Pics in Graphics: Agustin Carstens, Christine Lagarde