Without Fear or Favour

Displaying a shocking lack of empathy for ordinary suffering Greeks, Christine Lagarde, the managing director of the IMF, says she “thinks more of the little kids from a school in a little village in Niger, because they need even more help than the people of Athens,” in an interview in the Guardian.

Ordinary Greeks can hardly be blamed for an economy that tolerated a large degree of tax avoidance. That was an equilibrium that somehow worked for Greece – before members of the euro-elite, like Lagarde, encouraged the country to join the euro.

When Lagarde says it’s payback time, she doesn’t have the rich Greeks – who have stashed their dosh in Swiss banks and London property – in mind. It’s the little people, who are unable to obtain life saving drugs, who have to pay taxes; as Leona Helmsley might have said.

Regardless, the Greece’s balance sheet isn’t going to look healthier if Greek parents, whose children are being affected by spending cuts, “pay their taxes.” This money would be spent bailing out French bankers who speculated on Greek debt – just like the so-called ‘bailout’ funds.

Under Lagarde’s leadership, the IMF has effectively become part of the EU’s machinery (see The IMF is Turning Into A Monster). Its usual policy prescriptions for a country in Greece’s position – lending into a devaluation and structural adjustment – have been thrown by wayside. Instead the IMF is merely financing a German and French bank rescue.

The IMF would also be expected to promise to assist whatever decision Greece comes to, even if it means exiting the euro. But Lagarde, an unapologetic fan of the euro – who only the other day was wittering on about how the concept of a single currency dates back to Charlemagne – has nothing to offer but spiteful threats. Sounding like a fully signed-up member of the nasty party is hardly going to endear the Troika to the Greek electorate, but maybe that’s the point.

She’s miffed that untaxed Greek capital will flood back into the country, seed a rapid recovery, and show her up. As recently as last September, when Europe’s financial system was about to go off the rails, Lagarde was clownishly assuring the world that everyone’s “anxieties and fears are overestimated,” and that “analysts need only look under the skin of budgets and economies to appreciate their solidity.”

It’s Lagarde that has been overestimated – and not least by airheads like Judith Woods, writing in the Telegraph. She has chosen a most inopportune moment to adulate Madame Lagarde, who she’d like to be “when I grow up”. Indeed, imagining that the IMF needs leaders who are silken, silver, seductive, and foxy is unbelievable childish – even if ‘seduction’ is an integral part of the IMF’s culture.

Personally, I think Lagarde bears more resemblance to tanning mom. Though I’m guessing that tanning mom has more integrity than the pampered Marie Antoinette guiding the EU’s vanity project onto the rocks.

(On Twitter @TheAngryAnalyst)