U.S. TREASURY MISCALCULATION?

PositionSecond choice for International Monetary Fund, Horst Kohler, could be more independent minded than candidate Treasury Department opposed - Brief Article

Now that the question of the next head of the International Monetary Fund has been settled, the normal second guessing has already set in. The main point: The U.S. Treasury may have won the battle over this particular personnel decision but lost the war in terms of its relationship with the IMF. The Treasury led the effort to reject the initial German-sponsored candidate, Caio Koch-Weser (some Europeans claim, rightly or wrongly, this is because Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers, while in an earlier stint at the World Bank, engaged in a brutal conflict with Koch-Weser's wife, a strict environmentalist and head of the World Bank's environmental unit). Had Koch-Weser survived, he would have taken office wounded and with little credibility, given the massive assault from U.S. and several European authorities regarding his qualifications for the job. Put another way, the IMF would have then become even easier for the U.S. to dominate.

The irony is that Treasury will now face...

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