International Monetary Fund head Dominique Strauss-Kahn made a series of headline-grabbing statements late last week, calling for new supervisory authority over world financial markets and even the exploration of a new global reserve currency.
“Our mandate must cover the full range of macroeconomic and financial sector policies that bear on global stability in the modern world,” Strauss-Kahn told the annual gathering of the Bretton Woods Committee on Friday. “And that, in many ways, is the bottom line: to strengthen the fund’s role as the guardian of systemic stability.”
Declaring the need for a new “multilateral surveillance” system, the French managing director said what the IMF wants “is a new focus and capacity to deal with systemic risks.”
If approved, the new surveillance procedures “would allow — indeed require — the fund to assess the broader and systemic effects of country-level policies, and the associated risks, in a fundamentally different way,”
Alex Newman exposes new attempts to empower the IMF to deal with the financial crisis @ http://www.thenewamerican.com/index.php/economy/economics-mainmenu-44/3052-imf-seeks-new-mandate-global-currency