Asians should be asking a different question: Isn’t now the time to install one of their own as IMF managing director?
-- Sri Mulyani Indrawati. Few developing nations have made bigger advances over the last dozen years than Indonesia. During her stint as finance minister from 2005 to 2010, Sri Mulyani did a stellar job reducing growth-squandering regulations, modernizing the banking system and increasing accountability in ways the nation hadn’t seen in generations. Her anti-corruption campaign cheered investors and Transparency International<http://www.transparency.org/>alike. Street Credibility She was so effective that Indonesian opposition parties engineered her departure to a senior gig at the World Bank<http://topics.bloomberg.com/world-bank/>--to get her out of the way. Why not invite her to walk down 19th Street in Washington <http://topics.bloomberg.com/washington/> to run its sister institution? The IMF would get some serious street credibility among developing nations and the Muslim world. And judging from my own conversations with Sri Mulyani, she would know better than to stay in a $3,000 hotel suite.
