All these are arguments that have been advanced time and again, even if not necessarily from within the mainstream. What is revealing is that Stiglitz holds that when he chose to use his position to change what was obviously bad policy, officials and economists at the IMF blamed the board of directors, influenced by the Treasury, as being the cause for inertia, while elements in the board argued that the economists were in control. To quote Stiglitz, "it was maddening, not just because the IMF's inertia was so hard to stop but because, with everything going on behind closed doors, it was impossible to know who was the obstacle to change."
 
That indictment is more than damaging. It comes in a context where one of the principal contributions of the spring meetings was consensus over a view that the IMF has been espousing for some time now. This is that greater transparency in policy-making is the key to improving the functioning of national economies as well as the international financial system. Unfortunately for the Fund, the spring meetings began in the midst of turmoil in U.S. and world stock markets, which had generated fears of a real economic slowdown. This turmoil was led by a collapse of the Nasdaq index from the speculative highs it had reached in recent months, indicating that even in the most free and transparent U.S. economy, financial markets do not work.
 
The lack of transparency in the IMF's functioning does not stop with the kind of experiences focussed on by Stiglitz. It took its crudest form in the recent muddle over the appointment of a successor to Michel Camdessus who chose to step down as managing director of the IMF before his third term was through. If allowed to make the decision, the U.S. would have liked to fill the gap with Stanley Fischer, the first deputy managing director of the IMF. But in the democratic and transparent world of neo-colonial domination, all games are fair. For fear of war, all spoils won are equally divided. In the convention that guides that division, the U.S. gets the right to nominate its own citizen at the head of the World Bank and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). Europe gets to keep the formal headship of the IMF.
 
However Europe, unlike the U.S., is no single country. While united against the U.S. and celebrating monetary union, deep divisions simmer under a yet to be fully formed European identity. These tensions, and the fact that France with Jacques DeLarosiere and then with Michel Camdessus had occupied the European seat at the IMF for 22 years, convinced Germany and its Chancellor, Gerard Shroeder, that Germany being Europe's natural leader it was time the seat was occupied by a German. France, initially hopeful of retaining the chair, gave in to the German claim. Italy, with a couple of eligible candidates in hand, also made a bid, but withdrew in deference to European unity. All this would have made the task easier if Germany's first choice, chronologically speaking, Caio Koch-Weser, was not considered by many as being a poor choice. But with unity vis-a-vis the U.S. being of paramount importance, the Europeans gave in to Shroeder's zeal for installing Koch-Weser in Washington at any cost.
 
It was left to the U.S. to test the delicate diplomatic balance and threaten a veto of the German nominee. It was in the face of that threat that Shroeder had to offer another candidate in the form of Horst Kohler, who finally won the race, though he has been widely described as a lame duck for the job. In the words of The Financial Times: "His relationship with the irascible Larry Summers, the U.S. Treasury Secretary, starts off on the cool side of lukewarm, and Mr. Kohler evokes little more enthusiasm in Paris, Rome and London."
 
But the Kohler appointment did not happen before Japan had staked a claim for the top job at the Fund for its own Eisuke Sakakibara, an internationally acclaimed economist-diplomat renowned for an ability to influence foreign exchange markets. He was favoured by many. Besides violating the convention that a European acceptable to the U.S. must occupy the Chair at the IMF, Sakakibara's candidature must have been anathema given his strident criticism of the way the IMF handled the South-East Asian crisis. In the event, power prevailed over reason, and Sakakibara too withdrew in favour of Kohler. This episode in the IMF's history does not just starkly reveal who dominates this multilateral forum, but also brings to the fore the utter lack of transparency in deciding on the person who should play the role of free market messiah for the next five years.
 
Informed journalistic reports make clear that secretive diplomatic efforts and transatlantic phone calls were the means by which the slot was finally filled without any further public display of discord. No sane, thinking person can believe that an organisation which headhunts its chief in this fashion displays even a modicum of transparency. Which is what makes the IMF's effort to use the excuse of transparency to force market economics down the throats of a reticent, crisis-ridden Third World appalling, to say the least. But there is little reason to be appalled. All it takes is to understand that the transparency slogan is just one more confidence trick on the part of a visibly incompetent, but still domineering, international elite to straddle the globe with impunity. This hollow grandeur only reinforces the perception that the IMF is in a state of imperial decay.