Christine Lagarde has leaped into a hot job, an inferno, as the first woman to head the International Monetary Fund less than a week after after having been chosen.
She has already made several comments, one sensible, another nonsense, and a third that smacks of political naivete, all illustrating a multitude of problems facing her. The sensible one was that "The IMF does not belong to anybody. It belongs to the 187 members of the fund, and the management of the fund does not belong to any particular nation or region." She pledged: "I will make it my overriding goal that our institution continues to serve its entire membership with the same focus and the same spirit."
Too bad that Lagarde did not appreciate this in campaigning for the job, and giving a loud and clear "Vive l'Europe" as one of her opening slogans. Her overwhelming victory by consensus after Europe was joined by the United States, China, Japan and India only masks still widely felt resentment that the Europeans, and particularly the French, have again stolen the top IMF job.