It’s not just Martin
Hutchinson who looks at the IMF’s report
on financing its running costs and sees a picture of obsolescence. The
Economist, too, is getting in on the act:
Mr Crockett’s team wants the fund to fund itself by building an endowment
it could live off forever. But if this goes on, the IMF will have to answer
the question: should it live forever? If borrowers won’t take its tainted
lucre, and financial crises remain so scarce on the ground (admittedly two
GIGANTIC if’s), then the calls for the IMF to dissolve itself and return the
money to its national shareholders—a position formerly the province
of the lunatic left and reactionary right—will start to sound a lot
more reasonable.
It’s probably worth pointing out that none of the IMF’s shareholders really
need the money: Brazil and Saudi Arabia don’t need more foreign reserves, and
Italy and the USA aren’t going to pay down much in the way of debt if they get
their IMF quotas back. Much better that the money stay in Washington, just in
case: no one thinks that there will be no more global monetary crises, ever.
What’s needed is a way of bringing the Fund out of the red – and the
Crockett report comes up with exactly such a way. Sell the gold, which is doing
no good sitting in vaults, and buy income-producing bonds which can be used
to pay economists to do crucial-if-boring things such as the generation of reliable
and internationally comparable macroeconomic statistics. The Economist, of all
publications, should like that idea!