Kristalina Georgieva starts to sing, in Bulgarian, right there at the table — quietly, but firmly, the way you might sing to a child on absolutely her last lullaby of the evening. It is a song she wrote as a teenager in the late 1960s, in her grandparents’ village in the mountains in communist-era Bulgaria, when she ran out of shelves in the local library and started reading philosophy. She finishes a couplet, then translates.
But what is the value of Kant and Spinoza
If somebody else writes predictions for me?
The translation itself has a metre, and she looks at me as she stresses the first syllable of each dactyl. The song, with its playful plea for self-determination, was “almost political”, she says. “Of course, I would sing it and I would go home and say, ‘My God what have I done?’ ”
On the day we have lunch, Georgieva, 67, is celebrating her first anniversary as managing director of the International Monetary Fund. The position itself comes with enormous responsibility — to save the world during a financial crisis. But it has very little formal power. The IMF can’t do too much lending without the consent of its most powerful members; so whoever runs the fund has only the right to persuade presidents and prime ministers to act. Georgieva’s job is perfectly, maddeningly, political.
And right now it’s especially important. In the coming week, the IMF will update its forecasts for global growth. When it last did this, in June, the fund’s economists anticipated drops in 2020 of 8 per cent in the developed world, and 3 per cent in emerging economies, referring to “synchronised, deep downturns”. The fund said on Tuesday that the outlook was “less dire than expected”, but has also warned that if the global recession turns into a global financial crisis, things could get worse.
In her first year, Georgieva is already facing the most horrific version of every IMF chief’s basic challenge: how do you persuade rich countries to help out poor ones? And if you can do that, how do you attach the right strings to make sure the help sticks? And if you can do that, how do you make sure the poor countries trust that help from the IMF is sincere, when in the past it has caused further destruction? She will have to do all this with informal power, as the kind of person who will write you a song.
In high school she had amused classmates by composing gently counter-revolutionary marches for when they had to drill with broken rifles in the summer. She sang me her song about Spinoza to illustrate a point. As a child and then a young professor in Sofia, she had more power than she thought at the time. “People like me were very useful,” she says. “We created the impression that there was more freedom than we actually had.”
She has invited me to Tonic at Quigley’s, a bar in an old drugstore tucked away in the urban campus of George Washington University, a short walk from the IMF’s headquarters in Washington. There’s a place like Tonic near every American college; students can stop by for an appropriate lunch when their parents are in town, then return for pitchers when their parents are safely back at the hotel.