Jose Angel Gurria, possible replacement for Strauss-Kahn

Taken from The Wall Street Journal

By William Horobin
Paris has plenty to offer the International Monetary Fund.

As the tussle to replace Dominique Strauss-Kahn unofficially begins, many eyes are turning again to France and finance minister Christine Lagarde.

But she may not be the only candidate Paris is harboring.

Should the gaze of world leaders shift from east to west, from the finance ministry to the Chateau de la Muette, it would fall on the Organization for Economic Development and its energetic Secretary-General Angel Gurria.

The Mexican national wouldn’t be drawn on the issue at a conference here in Brussels.
“There are no job openings right now. This is a human tragedy and the [IMF] is working normally and very effectively,” Gurria said before jumping in a car to catch a train out of Brussels.

Nonetheless, Gurria’s resume checks some important boxes.

For a start, he’s an economist by training, educated partly in the U.K., with two degrees in the subject. And he’s put that expertise into practice as Mexico’s finance minister.

Prior to that, he was no stranger to the intricacies of currency and bond markets. In Brussels today he began his speech at the Economic Forum—which Dominique Strauss-Kahn was slated to attend–by describing his work at the Mexican electricity commission on floating a bond.

“You had to calculate and weight 14 different currencies in order to calculate the interest payments you’d have to make every month,” he explained.

Good practice maybe for overseeing an expansion of the IMF’s Special Drawing Rights, an international reserve asset based on a basket of currencies.

As a Mexican civil servant he has direct experience resolving sovereign debt crises in Latin American during the 1980s and from his involvement in Brady bonds. That might prove handy in Europe.

But it’s his diplomacy skills that could prove particularly useful, should the IMF top job come up and he throws his hat in the ring.

He’s served as Mexico’s foreign affairs minister, where the OECD says he made dialogue and consensus-building one of the hallmarks of his approach to global issues.

Gurria is also a polyglot, speaking Spanish, French, English, Portuguese, Italian and “some German,” according to his resume.

At the helm of the 34-member OECD, he’s overseen the accession of Chile, Estonia, Israel and Slovenia and carved out an active role in G-8 and G-20 summits.

A Mexican national, he would also satisfy the expectation that emerging economies warrant greater representation at the IMF. (He’s not the only Mexican whose name has been floated: the list includes former president Ernesto Zedillo, central bank governor Agustin Carstens and former central bank chief and finance minister Guillermo Ortiz.)

But is he European enough? European financial officials in Brussels Monday and Tuesday made it clear they wouldn’t surrender European influence to the United States lightly in any reshuffle at the IMF and the World Bank.

Gurria might just think he can bridge that gap, as hinted when he described his work grappling with floating bonds in European units of account before the birth of the euro. “I suppose that makes me a Europhile. I confess I am”