When the International Monetary Fund rolled into Ireland as one-third of the sinisterly monikered “troika”, the fist of its IMF acronym punched fear and revulsion into much of the populace.
But before the filthy business of Irish, Greek and Portuguese bailouts, the body was birthed at Bretton Woods at the end of the war, the brainchild of the brilliant John Maynard Keynes and the US treasury’s Harry Dexter White. The interwar period had shown the dangers of excessive austerity, and Keynes believed an enabling body was needed to “grease the wheels of commerce” and act as a source of international money. Co-founder White had a vision of a body to make short-term loans to economies in distress and advocate a system of strict currency regulation. The fund has evolved today into an “international credit union for countries”.
In this second of the Alain de Botton-brokered Visual Editions series, Pulitzer Prize winner Liaquat Ahamed went on the road to peel back the IMF monolith and expose its personality and workings. With a photographer, he spent time at its headquarters in Washington; at its annual knees-up in Tokyo; in Dublin during an inspection trip; and in Maputo, Mozambique, where the bank operates as an advisory body or ratings agency out of a corrugated-roof building.
Ahamed made his name as a demystifier of economics and history with Lords of Finance, a 2009 book on the 1929 crash. Now he explains the workings of the IMF and the source of its "wealth". The 188 member countries pay deposits according to criteria of economic power and can avail of loans if they stumble into temporary pecuniary embarrassment. The repayment of this money, as we in Ireland know well, is subject to stringent conditions. Ahamed traces how early annual meetings mutated from "a conclave of the cardinals of capitalism" to a type of "sales convention for global bankers" by the 1970s. What emerges is an organisation aware of its failures of judgment – there are clear references to wrong solutions cooked up for the Asian crisis of the late 1990s.
This book is handsome but the photographs are disappointing – doomed perhaps by the ashen predominance of meetings and the people who attend them. Pictures of businessmen must be the direst advertisement for commerce: the dullness of boardroom iconography has no doubt deterred many an entrepreneur from diving in. While photographer Eli Reed’s task of visually capturing an invisible body was considerable, it is a missed opportunity. The blood, sweat and tears of administration – and surely the parallel exhilaration of financial problem-solving and corporate communication – are not caught here.
These IMF people are making history but pictorially could be engaged in parochial matters, planning city sewers or sitting on school boards. Apart from uninspired images of Dublin and the skeletal Anglo shell, Reed’s pictures are generally confined to familiar representations of that species classified as “suits”. A little comedy is evident in a businessman on a bicycle as he pauses outside a Temple Bar clothes shop. Flicking though these images, you may feel a strong temptation to abandon your office-bound life and run away to join the circus or cajole your co-directors to form a free electric band.
The IMF is presented as a vast and important piece of infrastructure. Its helping hands (or interfering tentacles) have a finger in many global pies. Ahamed sheds light on this agency which continues to live heatedly in the headlines of Irish media as the grail of early loan repayment is sought. His neat account sketches how this obscure agent of macroeconomics shapes the discourse and lives of ordinary people. When he describes 2012 Dublin in the grip of self-reproach and its bookshops full of opportunistic works castigating our collective folly, you want more – for this is the real 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 malaise is lucid and detached, yet at heart sympathetic. But ultimately he defines his book as 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.
