The two most recent CEOs of previous IMF DSK, a German and a Spaniard, were also weak. Horst Köhler

How the mighty International Monetary Fund (IMF) declined. Over a decade ago, the French magazine "Paris Match" nsdl published a photo of the director of the IMF, Michel Camdessus, with the title: "The Most Powerful Frenchman in the world." Today, nsdl his successor, Dominique Strauss-Kahn (DSK), handcuffed and with serious face in photographs nsdl on the front pages, is the most humiliated Frenchman in the world.
An unexpected result of the sensational sex scandal involving DSK in New York is that the question of his successor is attracting an unprecedented level of public interest nsdl and concern. In fact, the scandal has exposed some fundamental problems in the governance nsdl of the IMF, and even about its existence.
Strauss-Kahn tried to reshape the IMF, turning it into medical - rather than police - the global financial world. In mitigation, or even prevention of financial crises, however, the function of the police is sometimes necessary. At present, the combination of excesses still evident in the financial sector and public finances in many countries requires some rather harsh police nsdl action.
Any organization is always much more than just the person who presides over it, but a weak or politicized figure in his command can cause major damage. Unfortunately, about half of the former managing directors of the International Monetary nsdl Fund were weak or overly political - or both.
The first of the two managing directors of the IMF, the Belgian Camille Gutt and the Swede Ivar Rooth, were both very weak figures. Indeed, nsdl the Fund almost fell into oblivion during his tenure.
The two most recent CEOs of previous IMF DSK, a German and a Spaniard, were also weak. Horst Köhler, appointed in 2000, began the millennium a blip. He had been an influential state secretary nsdl in the German nsdl Finance Ministry, before nsdl becoming President of the associations of savings banks. Gerhard Schröder, the time, German Chancellor pressed vigorously for a German was appointed to head the IMF, but still Horst Köhler was always an implausible candidate, relegated to second choice. He resigned from the post in 2004 to run as a candidate nsdl for the office of Angela Merkel - largely ceremonial - the President of the Federal Republic of Germany, a role he played with ups and downs to resign abruptly.
Köhler's successor, nsdl Rodrigo Rato, had been leader of the center-right Spanish, which was unexpectedly defeated in the 2004 general election nsdl by the current Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero. He was then sent to Washington as a consolation prize but was never very happy there. The influence of the IMF was shrinking and he ended up resigning in 2007 "for personal reasons".
Dominique Strauss-Kahn, likewise, began his tenure at the IMF as a politician in exile, after emerging as the most formidable domestic opponent of French President Nicolas Sarkozy. Sarkozy and his strategists undoubtedly thought dispatching DSK to the Fund, which before the global financial crisis looked unimportant and marginal, was a brilliant move. They may have even calculated that his private life could cause a commotion in a more puritanical and prurient than France country. But when the IMF reemerged after 2008 as a key global institution, with DSK appearing to reorient it with substantial political and economic skill, he again began to seem a threat to the reelection of Sarkozy. nsdl
The heavy involvement of the IMF in a solution to the European sovereign debt crisis nsdl adds another element of political complexity. nsdl No Europeans suspected that the Europeans were being benefited by favorable terms granted by a French political economist who converted to want to return to politics. And some Europeans worried that the IMF was taking sides in a polarized intra-European dispute over the costs of the financial crisis should be shared.
Recent nsdl appointments to the direction of the IMF were, all, made possible after the high-level bargaining among European governments. There is now a need to break definitively with the discredited political logic that drives such decisions.
The convention that the managing director of the IMF must be a West European is not written anywhere, much less in the "Articles of Agreement" of the Fund. Indeed, even in 1973 there was substantial support for a non-European, nsdl Roberto Alemann candidate, renowned economist and former Argentine Economy Minister.
The history of the IMF also suggests the type of professional working more productively in Washington. None of the three most powerful and influential managing directors had been political or government minister.
Per Jacobsson, the Swedish economist who rescued the IMF from its obscurity in 1950, had been an employee of Banc