Strauss Kahn s Choice

The IMF after DSK

That is why DSK was arrested.

Strauss Kahn is proving himself a sagacious leader of the IMF.

But, as Strauss then admitted, it ain't so.

Then the global financial crisis hit, and Strauss Kahn was propelled to center stage.

This is a situation tailor made for Strauss Kahn and the new IMF to ride to the rescue.

It appears that a new IMF has gradually, and cautiously, emerged under the leadership of Dominique Strauss Kahn.

He explained to me about Johann Strauss, and how he created the waltzes that became so famous in the world.

Strauss Kahn is, of course, likely to be Sarkozy s Socialist rival in the next French presidential election.

It may seem curious that Strauss Kahn s instincts are so off the mark on the matter of capital controls. One might have thought that a socialist, and a French Socialist at that, would be more inclined toward finance skepticism.

But marriage can be a fraught institution (as Strauss Kahn may know better than most).

Dominique Strauss Kahn, the managing director of the International Monetary Fund, was uncharacteristically blunt for an international official.

Richard Georg Strauss (11 June 1864 8 September 1949) was a leading German composer of the late Romantic and early modern eras.

To be sure, IMF Managing Director Dominique Strauss Kahn recently called for a global fiscal response to the worsening recession.

DSK tried to remake the IMF into a doctor of global finance, rather than a policeman.

The IMF s two most recent managing directors before DSK, a German and a Spaniard, were also weak.

Strauss Kahn s response that taxes on capital flows are costly and ineffective is therefore unfortunate.

One might have thought that a socialist, and a French Socialist at that, would be more inclined toward finance skepticism.

Under the leadership of Dominique Strauss Kahn, the Fund was in thrall to the French and German governments, which adamantly opposed debt relief.

But the IMF has changed a great deal in recent years, largely under the auspices of Dominique Strauss Kahn, its current managing director.

In other words, the DSK case was part of another clash of cultures over sex, and, if only tangentially, religion.

Let me be clear I am not saying that Assange, much less Dominique Strauss Kahn, committed no crime against women.

But will incoming IMF Managing Director Dominique Strauss Kahn be able to exercise this new power quickly enough to avert a crisis?

But now Strauss Kahn is throwing cold water on proposals to tax international flows of hot money.

Sarkozy s popularity is hitting new lows, and Strauss Kahn s friends say that he has never made a secret of his political ambitions.

Strauss Kahn is proving himself a sagacious leader of the IMF. We can only hope that governments and financial markets heed his words.

Under its capable managing director, Dominique Strauss Kahn, the Fund has been one of the few official agencies ahead of instead of behind the curve.

As Dominique Strauss Kahn, then France s finance minister, put it in 1997, People who are married do not want others in the bedroom.

Today, his successor, Dominique Strauss Kahn (DSK), handcuffed and grave in ubiquitous front page photos, is the most humiliated Frenchman in the world.

When asked about the role of capital controls, Strauss Kahn said he was not wedded to any rigid ideology on the subject.

It may seem curious that Strauss Kahn s instincts are so off the mark on the matter of capital controls.

DSK, too, began his tenure at the IMF as a politician in exile, after emerging as French President Nicolas Sarkozy s most formidable domestic opponent.

Both Polanski and DSK were engaged in sexual activities with women who were far from being their equals, in age and social status, respectively.

Indeed, Sarkozy has an additional incentive, given that he would be scoring a point against the IMF, led by Dominique Strauss Kahn, his likely Socialist opponent in the next presidential election.

IMF Managing Director Dominique Strauss Kahn declared the move historic and the most important decision on the Fund s governance since its establishment in 1944.

With France s next presidential election fast approaching in 2012, the last thing Sarkozy now needs is for Strauss Kahn to play a statesman like role in saving the euro zone.

Ms. Strauss (International Organization for Migration (IOM)), speaking on agenda item 64, said that many misperceptions surrounded violence against migrants and the problem of trafficking.

In early April, the Fund made public two documents, one presented to the Board and a more technical staff note, together with a statement by Managing Director Dominique Strauss Kahn.

More than that, the arrest of DSK was supposedly revenge for France s protection of another man accused of sexual crimes, Roman Polanski, and for the French ban on the burqa.

True, neither of Dominique Strauss Kahn s two predecessors left amidst scandal as he did. Then again, both of those resignations suggested that the men in question had not taken the job seriously enough.

Sarkozy and his strategists, no doubt, thought that sending DSK to the Fund, which before the global financial crisis looked unimportant and marginal, was a brilliant coup.

Under its capable managing director, Dominique Strauss Kahn, and distinguished chief economist, Olivier Blanchard, it has been a voice for sanity on global fiscal stimulus in the midst of much cacophony.

Now, however, the rumor mill is heating up with gossip that the Fund s managing director, Dominique Strauss Kahn, will leave in order to oppose Nikolas Sarkozy in the 2012 French presidential elections.

One of the greatest chairmen the Democratic Party ever had, Bob Strauss (cheers, applause) used to say that ever politician wants every voter to believe he was born in a log cabin he built himself.