The IMF doesn’t need to be run by a European

How much longer should the IMF be run by a European? The job of the fund is to assist any member country which is in trouble, not to advance the dream of European integration. So far, since it all began after the war, the IMF’s managing directors have been Europeans, most commonly French. The current one, Christine Lagarde, is a French former politician, as was her predecessor, the socialist sex-maniac Dominique Strauss-Kahn. In her opinion, the needs of the EU trump everything, but that is a political view, not a financial one. It must be annoying for the scores of poorer, non-European IMF members — e.g. the Philippines, Mexico, Jamaica — to be paying for this. When Britain had to call in the IMF in the 1970s, we felt ashamed, but we never doubted that the fund saw its task as putting our economy to rights. Imagine what we would have felt if we had thought it was working to help not us, but Brussels.