•/Divine comedy. As a long, al fresco interview with Lucio Vinhas de Souza, accompanied by the noise of car horns, sirens, and an inconveniently placed ghetto blaster drifted to an end, Emerging Markets popped in a final question. What would the return of US petroleum exports do to Russia’s increasingly embattled finances? Moody’s Investors Service’s chief sovereign economist’s face clouded over for a moment, before an answer was located. “I am fiscally agnostic about these things,” he quipped before rushing to add: “That was just a joke. I was joking just there. I am not fiscally agnostic.” Who said humour at the IMF was dead?
•/Money for nothing. The threat of an embarrassing outbreak of industrial action at the World Bank faded yesterday after the group’s embattled CFO Bertrand Badre grandly announced he would decline a $94,000 bonus. News of the award had angered staff coping with a belt-tightening exercise imposed by President Jim Yong Kim, which prompted a brief threat of strike action. Sources told Out Of The Woods staff cheered and applauded when Kim revealed the news of Badre’s sacrifice at a packed town hall meeting on Tuesday evening.
•/Friend or foe? The mere existence of the Brics Bank acts as a sharp reminder of how the multilateral status quo has failed many of its smaller shareholder-constituents. Heard in the main foyer of the IMF building: a brace of senior officials from South Asia bemoaning the “lack of joined-up thinking” that convinced such a diverse group of emerging markets sovereign shareholders to go it alone. “If the IMF and the World Bank had been doing their job in the first place, there would be no need for this new institution.”
•/Desperate business? Located in Out Of The Woods’ email account this morning, an eminently forgettable offer from Elsa, chief marketing guru at an aquatically minded import-export firm from Beijing. “We heard you are good supplier of Swimming Pool Cover and you have the rich experience in this [sic]”, the offer began, continuing on in the same, juicy vein with an entreaty to ship only “good quality covers”. Any offers?
•/Waffle for breakfast. Argentine president-cum-vulture hunter Cristina Fernández may regret that history got in the way of Uruguay and Argentina becoming a single “great nation” but not everyone from the land of the painted birds agrees. Asked to field questions at an early morning panel on Latin America, the World Bank’s regional spokesman, Sergio Jellinek, himself a Uruguayan native, jested about the tendency of his beloved neighbours to love a good blether. “Always the same with these Argentines, you give them one question and they ask for two, three, even four!”