Yet, the agency and its leader also have grown unpopular here among lawmakers, who have missed no opportunity to snipe at the IMF whenever the U.S. administration has asked them to approve more money for it. Eventually, they have capitulated on almost every occasion. Nationalists here argue the Fund wastes U.S. money and fails to promote U.S. values abroad - even as internationalists decry the heavy hand with which the agency restructures the rest of the world in the U.S. image. Free-marketeers want the IMF to stop bailing out private investors and let them feel the pain of unwise moves rather than encourage moral hazards and repeated mistakes. Populists agree, arguing that public funds have been used to rescue private gamblers.
Abolitionists demand that the agency be scrubbed.
Everyone seems to agree the agency has been too secretive. We have tried to give as much as allowed by our membership to make this institution totally transparent. Camdessus's departure long has been rumoured amid growing criticism of the Fund's handling of financial crises which began in Thailand in mid-1997. The IMF assembled international emergency loans of more than 100 billion dollars to stop the trouble, only to watch 40 percent of the global economy get pushed into recession. The Fund is upgrading its current projections of global economic growth, however, and the prospect of sustained recovery reminds Camdessus of a view long expressed by his deputy and interim successor, Fischer.