The Role of the IMF in the International Financial and Eurozone Crises

Abstract

On 23 September 2007, Dominique Strauss-Kahn was named the Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF). In his speech on that day (as reported in Weisman, 2007), he summarized the challenges facing the IMF as ‘relevance and legitimacy’. Eighteen months later, the final communiqué of the Group of Twenty (G20) meeting of April 2009 (G20, 2009) voted to triple IMF lending capacity and authorized a substantial expansion in the stock of special drawing rights in circulation. By the end of 2010, the IMF had partnered with the European Union (EU) to design and administer financial relief packages for Greece and Ireland (IMF, 2011). The IMF went in short order from a supernumerary role to a central place on the world stage. What brought about this shift?KeywordsEuropean UnionInternational Monetary FundEuropean Central BankSudden StopWorld Economic OutlookThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.