When the International Monetary Fund rolled into Ireland as one-third of the “troika”, the fist of its IMF initialism punched fear and revulsion into many. Liaquat Ahamed, a Pulitzer Prize winner, went on the road to peel back the IMF monolith and expose its personality and workings, spending time at its headquarters, in Washington, at its annual knees-up in Tokyo, in Dublin during an inspection, and in Mozambique, in its corrugated-roof building in Maputo. Ahamed’s neat account sketches how this obscure agent of macroeconomics shapes the lives of ordinary people. When he describes 2012 Dublin in the grip of self-reproach, you want more: this is the world of commerce away from diagrams and charts; it is the living culture of people and mindsets behind the market. Ahamed’s description of our bailout is lucid and detached yet sympathetic. But ultimately his book is an organisational inquiry, not a psychosocial study. He paints not so much an intimate portrait of the IMF as a useful landscape of its benign bureaucracy.
