•/ Full disclosure Amber Rudd’s plans to make businesses disclose their number of foreign workers have been variously mocked and panned. But one wag padding the halls this week in Washington spotted a silver lining to the British home secretary’s cloudy judgement: “This could mean the Conservative party will have to disclose how many of its donors are foreign. As in,” he said with a throaty chuckle, “foreign for tax reasons.”
•/Dial ‘M’ for multilateral These must be tough times for the IMF’s internal communications ombudsman. Spotted in the fulcrum of the press office: a giant, old-fashioned beige telephone emblazoned with the mysterious designation of ‘Concordia Apartments’. There it sits in splendid isolation, asking users to dial 9 for local calls and zero if the light is flashing. OOTW called the 202 number on the handle: Line disconnected!
•/Schäuble gets wiggy At the landmark seminar of the day, CNN anchor Richard Quest prodded and poked his panel, seeking to elicit a dressing-down of Donald Trump, a man who would be America’s first celebrity president. Finally, Germany’s finance minister Wolfgang Schäuble succumbed. “I never thought we would see this kind of demagoguery return,” he fumed, adding that Hitler was “defeated by a united Europe and a united West.” Well, sort of. But kudos all the same.
•/Claws out At the same panel, Schäuble was also asked whether he was tired of talking about Greece. He was indeed. They should pay their own way, he railed, adding that Europe’s sovereign basket case “hadn’t paid interest on its debt in years”. He trailed off but not before adding, with a rumbly grumble: “And you can tell that to Stiglitz!” Clearly Nobel laureate Joseph S. had riled Wolfgang S. the wrong way by suggesting that Greece’s bailout money had been siphoned back to Frankfurt all those years ago, to prop up Germany’s lumpen old lenders. Miaow!
•/Take the midnight train Power ballads, like mullets and pet rocks, may be a thing of the past, but Lord Stewart Wood of Anfield, high on life in the post-Brexit era, was keen to outlining the investability of a free, independent and shrunken UK. “Don’t stop believing!” he told a rapt audience. “We’re going on a journey!” Much to OOTW’s regret, the boisterous Baron refused to burst out into song — or even to bust out a Bonnie Tyler wig. Next time maybe.
•/Avian folly Madagascar’s glotally surnamed finance minister Gervais Rakotoarimanana, clearly keen to be seen to be down with the kids (under 7’s), told a bewildered audience at the World Bank’s human capital summit that his homeland was “probably best known to them as the home of that famous Pixar cartoon”. The subdued ripple of laughter that trickled through the audience was perhaps due to the sinking realisation that the avian-rich movie was produced by DreamWorks. Doh!
•/Exit pursued by hacks Argentina is clearly taking its fiscal responsibilities painfully seriously. While chatting over a breakfast of stewed coffee and clammy eggs at our down-at-heel hotel, the full Emerging Markets editorial team bumped into Buenos Aires’ economy minister Alfonso Prat-Gay. Swatting away a flurry of requests for interviews,
he settled down for his own clammy eggs. Surely it’s time for Argentina to do another bond, with the proceeds to be used to pay for a better hotel so that P-G can escape our pack of hounding hacks and eat his breakfast in peace.