By Don Newman - from iPOLITICS.ca
The man who should be the next managing director of the IMF observed last week in a speech to the Canadian Club of Ottawa that the world is at a hinge point just as it was a hundred years ago.
The emergence of China and India is influencing wealth, work, and trade in the same way the emergence of the United States changed Great Britain and the major powers of Europe during the early part of the 20th century.
Economically, at least, we now live in a multi-polar world. Will security and strategic power follow the money? He didn’t say it wouldn’t.
The speaker was Bank of Canada Governor Mark Carney. In the policy deficit world in which Canadians now live, his remarks didn’t receive the attention they deserve. One can only hope people in the political and financial capitals of the world were paying attention.
To find someone running a central bank of a G-8 country who can articulate the stated facts clearly and positively is important when now is certainly the time to notice. Why? The International Monetary Fund needs a managing director.
The problems Dominique Strauss-Kahn brought upon himself last weekend in a New York hotel suite mean his tenure is over no matter how the sexual assault charges are disposed.
The job of secretary general of the IMF ebbs and flows in importance. It has never been more influential than right now as the international economy struggles to get back on its feet, and the G-20 emerges as the steering group of advanced and developing nations.
So the jockeying is on. Since its founding as the world’s economic policeman, the managing director has been a European by consensus. The quid pro quo is that the president of the World Bank is always an American.
So the Europeans are lobbying frantically for the IMF’s top job.
However, the rising power of the emerging economies has changed the governing and financial structure of the IMF, and a number of those countries are saying it’s time to put an end to the cosy deal on the fund’s top jobs.
The problem is there is no clear-cut emerging economy. Even if there were, it is not clear rivalries among those countries allow agreement on who that person should be.
As is generally accepted around the world, Canada in no way created the economic collapse. We also emerged from the downturn with our banks and economy intact and in much better shape than any other G-8 country.
There are many reasons for that, most of them dating to the 1990s. But the current government was in place and it was on Carney’s watch that Canada shone, so they have a rightful claim to the credit.
This fact alone should shatter the usual international claim particularily heard in Europe, that Canada is just an adjunct of the United States.
With its trillion-dollar deficits and bank bailouts, the U.S. would like to be an adjunct of Canada.
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