The International Monetary Fund (IMF) chief wasn't supposed to be the main attraction at the annual Federal Reserve conference held this summer in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, a sort of mini-Davos of the central-banking world. But Lagarde upstaged headliner Ben Bernanke with a dead-eyed tour d'horizon of global economic misery that included many pointed jabs at the European financial leaders from whose ranks she had so recently come. France's finance minister until June, Lagarde was out to prove -- and surely did so -- that she was no eurocrat, warning that unless Europe figured out how to urgently recapitalize its banks, contain the contagion of its most debt-heavy sovereign balance sheets, and, dauntingly, come up with "a common vision for its future," then the "serious flaws in the architecture of the eurozone" would "threaten the sustainability of the entire project."
As debuts go, the new IMF chief (you may recall what happened to the old one) certainly came out swinging, and in a way that suggests some optimism for the future of what has become arguably the world's most important financial institution. The fact that her prescriptions caused no small amount of indigestion on both sides of the pond was the surest sign she was on to something.
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