The IMF’s Christine Lagarde knows you’re anxious about the future
Corner Office from Marketplace
Marketplace
4.8 • 545 Ratings
🗓️ 27 March 2019
⏱️ 16 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
One of the few women leading global economic policy today is Christine Lagarde, the head of the International Monetary Fund. She says the biggest problems of our day, from cyberthreats to climate change, can’t be solved “by turning inwards, by looking at your belly button.” She describes herself as part architect, part firefighter and explains why she thinks banks would be better off if more of them had female CEOs.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hey, everybody, it's Kyle. Rosdahl. Thanks for downloading this episode of the Corner Office |
| 0:05.8 | podcast. We're going to start today with a little history lesson. It's 1944, the Mount Washington |
| 0:11.1 | Hotel in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire. Representatives from 44 countries have met to figure out a |
| 0:16.4 | framework for international economic cooperation after World War II. What they came up with was the |
| 0:21.9 | International Monetary Fund. Now, what exactly the IMF does has changed a lot over the years, but it |
| 0:27.5 | is the main agency right now focused on stability in the global economy. And that gets us to |
| 0:32.6 | today's episode in this very different moment in international economic history. |
| 0:55.3 | We're at the IMF headquarters in Washington, D.C. I'm talking to Christine Lagarde, the managing director of the IMF. She's been running the agency since 2011. I talked to her a couple of weeks back. We aired it on Marketplace, which is, as you know, my day job. But it was a really good conversation, and I thought we'd share a bit more of it with you. Here you go. Christine Legarde of the IMF. |
| 0:57.8 | We're expecting you. |
| 0:55.3 | Don't you but it was a really good conversation, and I thought we'd share a bit more of it with you. Here you go. Christine Lagarde of the IMF. |
| 0:57.8 | We're expecting you. |
| 0:58.7 | Don't you ever see? |
| 1:00.0 | Ready to go to work? |
| 1:03.5 | Madam Lagarde, welcome to the program. |
| 1:04.5 | Thank you. |
| 1:15.5 | I don't want to start sounding trivial, but I do want to know how much time you spend and your staff. |
| 1:18.0 | Explain it to people what the IMF does. |
| 1:23.7 | You know, I have rehearsed very carefully. |
| 1:27.2 | What is the IMF? What do we do? The IMF does three things. One, we give financial support |
| 1:33.0 | to countries that have a balance of payment issue. In other words, they can't pay what they're |
| 1:38.5 | buying. Number two, we give policy advice. And number three, we give technical assistance and training to countries that are trying to improve their financial management. |
| 1:52.0 | We never, ever give grants. |
... |
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