the dollar? No. It could not rescue any important emerging countries, as seen in Mexico in 1994/5,South East Asia in 1997 and Argentina in 2001, just to mention the most important crises of the lastdecade. Therefore, it is impossible for the IMF to save the US dollar. Truman (2005:14), suggeststhat the IMF should reaffirm its central role in international crises, including loan activities on alarge scale. He pointed out that in the 1970's, nobody spoke of the element of moral hazard and thatgiven the financial globalization, today there is more need than ever for a lender of last resort. Is theissue of moral hazard relevant in international bank lending and financial rescues? Or is it an issueserving to confusion over the issues of a closed economy and private loans with those of publicloans and an open economy? When Europe needed loans after the World War II, the Marshall Plandid not put any conditionality or spoke about moral hazard. The capital account and financial sector are fundamental if the IMF wants to the have a role in 21
st
century. (Truman, 2005)Moreover, the credibility of the IMF was also lost by not having a mechanism for transparent voting to elect their directors and executives. Since 1946, there has been a non writtenagreement, whereby chairmanship of the World Bank has belonged to the US. Meanwhile, thechairmanship of the IMF belonged to the Europeans. These “rules” are not to be found in writing;rather it has been a
de facto
way in which the International Financial Architecture (IFA) hasworked. In addition, staff in both institutions is mainly employees of countries from Europe and theUS. If the IMF wants to gain back its role as leader, changes are needed. Nevertheless, changing theabove mentioned will not only take time, but also a policy change will be required. There isscepticism that European and the US politicians will accept loosing power in these institutions andaccept the increasing power of emerging economies.Therefore, this has opened at least three possible scenarios for the future of the IFA that will be discussed within this document. However, before going deeper into these three scenarios it isnecessary to analyse the IMF during the second half of the 20
th
century comparing it with its currentsituation. Afterwards, in the next section, we will show three possible scenarios of the IFA for the21
st
century. The first scenario comes directly from the IMF and it is not actually a new reform.Most of the scenario was proposed by the Committee of the Twenty in 1974. Because thesuggestions in this proposal are similar to the ones of the reformist proposes, we will only point outthe IMF’s proposal. The second scenario is a scenario from Freedman and the monetarist theory.Although he has written on the damage the IMF has done, he has forgotten the reason for itscreation, based on the stabilization of the International Financial Arquitecture. The last scenariocomes from the Global South, where many regional solutions are being created. This scenario isstill new, and it is difficult to forecast if it will work better than the IMF. However, even if it fails,some competition to the IMF will be good for the IFA in terms of reducing political conditionality,
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