Camdessus cites success of increased transparency, calls country ownership IMF’s ‘ultimate objective’

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Following are edited excerpts of IMF Managing Director Michel Camdessus’s final press conference in Washington, D.C., on February 8. The full text of his remarks is available on the IMF’s website (www.imf.org).

CAMDESSUS: My only purpose this morning is to bid farewell to all of you and to thank you for your attitude toward the IMF, and myself, during my long stay here. You have been very fair, very professional, and very courteous. I’ll give you, immediately, a scoop. On Tuesday morning, February 15, I will be a nonentity. You will hear no more about me. So today, I can really speak my mind.

I am the son of a journalist. When I came here, I had an understanding of the press and only positive feelings about the press and media. But I had also recently had three years’ experience as a central banker. Thirteen years ago, in central banking, the virtue was not transparency but secrecy. I was split between these two things, but you convinced me, promptly, that I should go back to my genes and my inclination to speak as much as possible.

Now, at the end of this experience, I have a feeling of success and a feeling of failure. As for the sense of success, I believe you will recognize that we have made this institution distinctly more transparent. I have been preaching the golden rule of transparency to the world since the Mexican crisis at least. Further steps are certainly needed, but we are truly moving in the direction of positive change in the IMF.

The failure is that, in spite of that, we have not been able to change attitudes toward the image of this institution. There are still people around the world who can, without provoking an outcry, say that the IMF kills babies. You have the old demagoguery that pretends we don’t serve the common good. You have vested interests trying to destroy us because they know that we destroy them. You cannot confront the family monopolies in Indonesia, the chaebols in Korea, and so on, without provoking negative campaigns.

We suffer a lot. It’s possibly the price of a very strong contribution to the international common good. But we will have to continue working, together with the World Bank, to explain that all these necessarily tough programs serve a common good. If we see today—and I am happy to leave in such a context— the world economy exceeding all forecasts for growth, it is, I presume, the effect of our efforts and the actions of the very valiant, courageous, professional staff of this institution, and I am proud to say that.

I am also very happy to leave the IMF at a time when there is not so much talk...