mexico News-May 20

Posted by the Generals on May 23, 2011, 2:52 pm
206.116.64.118

Subject: Mexico News DAILY May 20, 2011 LatinNews Daily - 20 May 2011 Latin America's runners for the IMF Development: On 19 May Dominique Strauss-Kahn resigned as IMF managing director, starting the race to find his successor. Significance: Traditionally a Frenchman has held the top IMF job, but this time around, developing economies want one of their own to have the post. The irony for Latin America, which reeled under IMF structural adjustment programmes in the 1980s and 1990s, is that one of the big tasks for the next IMF managing director will be to recommend solutions to economic problems in Europe and, perhaps, the US. The two main candidates to succeed Strauss-Kahn from Latin America are Arminio Fraga Neto from Brazil and Agustín Carstens from Mexico. Key points: • The front-runner for Strauss-Kahn’s job is Christine Lagarde, the French finance minister. Her main (non-Latin American) rivals from the developing economies are Kemal Dervis, a former finance minister of Turkey; Tharman Shanmugaratnam, finance minister of Singapore (backed by the Asian countries); and Montek Singh Ahluwalia, deputy chairman of India’s planning commission. Central Asia has nominated Grigori Márchenko, the president of the Kazakh central bank. • Arguably, Turkey and Mexico suffered most from IMF structural adjustment policies. Brazil’s economic takeover began when it refused under President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (2003-2010) to take IMF advice and produced its own mix of policies. Fraga was central bank president under the preceding government of Fernando Henrique Cardoso (1995-2003), which appealed to the IMF for emergency help in 2002. • Carstens moved from being Mexico’s finance minister to become governor of the central bank in December 2009. He had previously been a deputy managing director at the IMF. Although Carstens is essentially a technocrat, he has served as a finance minister in the current Partido Acción Nacional (PAN) government of President Felipe Calderón. • Carstens is a longer shot than Fraga. Carstens’s service in a PAN government could count against him if the opinion polls for the 2012 presidential and congressional elections are correct and the Partido Revolucionario Institucional returns to power. Beside this, Mexico also already has one high profile international policymaker: José Angel Gurría, the secretary general of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

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