On the outside looking in at the IMF

The IMF is like a doctor prescribing medicine to its patients: if it isn’t hurting, it isn’t working. This is the summation of author Liaquat Ahamed, whose new book Money and Tough Love offers an insight into how the Fund operates.

When Liaquat Ahamed, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Lords of Finance – the story of the financial Armageddon that precipitated the Great Depression – accompanied the economists of the IMF to Dublin, he was surprised by the lack of hostility he encountered.

When countries are in trouble, the IMF will consider bailing them out – at a price. “Conditionality” is the fund’s term for the strings that are attached to loan programmes: austerity, cuts in social welfare, tax rises, privatisations and, an especial fund favourite, the end of subsidies on food, fuel and other staples.

So Ahamed was surprised by the even-handedness of an Irish immigration official he met in Dublin airport. The Irish, he inferred from this encounter, broadly accepted that responsibility for the country’s financial crisis lay with Fianna Fáil and Anglo-Irish Bank, and that the IMF was only trying to help.

Ahamed's new book Money and Tough Love is part primer on the IMF and part ethnography. Despite his impressive journalistic and analytical chops, Ahamed stays away from an attempt to interpret the institution, preferring simply to describe what he saw on his trips.

Except that Ahamed has not really been granted access to the inner sanctum of high finance. He is excluded from meetings where matters of substance are discussed, is given an audience with Christine Lagarde, who decides simply that he is not “a troublemaker”, and directly quotes no one from the fund. This means the book has lots of incidental detail, but much less meat.

Ahamed visited Tokyo in 2012, where he spent a week people-watching in the lobby of the Imperial Hotel, and in the fray at the Tokyo International Forum, the conference centre where the IMF’s annual jamboree took place.

He then followed fund managers to Dublin and Maputo, the capital of Mozambique, where he finds a local “mission” he thinks is more in touch with local politics and society than elsewhere. The mission remains quarantined to the local five star hotel “where fund missions always stay”. When an IMF recommendation to cut subsidies causes riots, staff are instructed not to go outside.

Ahamed remains in his hotel.

q&a men in suits talk money

Technically, it’s a picture book, isn’t it?

The publisher, Visual Editions, has previously been responsible for some truly beautiful books: chief among them its life-changing edition of Tristram Shandy, which is among the most wonderfully designed objects in literature. Visual Editions hired the photographer Eli Reed, a professor of photojournalism at the University of Texas, to accompany Ahamed. Mr Reed has produced some striking images from unpromising source material. The IMF houses a lot of men in suits.

Where are the best photos from?

Mr Reed clearly enjoys himself more when he gets to Mozambique, which is a more interesting visual setting than impromptu conference spaces with bar charts projected on to the walls. Christine Lagarde, on the book’s cover, contrasts pleasantly with the sea of suits surrounding her.

Is Ahamed right about the IMF?

The IMF, Ahamed insists, is like a doctor prescribing medicine to its patients: if it isn’t hurting, it isn’t working. Economically minded readers will be disappointed by Ahamed’s repeated claims that the IMF is like a doctor administering medicine to its patients. But in medicine, treatments are evaluated in terms of whether they have worked before. In economics, remedies are thought sensible if they feature in academic economics journals, whose editors are often more fond of elegant mathematical proofs than empirical evidence. If the metaphor of the IMF as a wise doctor, treating the patient with painful or invasive procedures proves apt, many would accuse it of violating the Hippocratic oath.

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