Back in January (of 2011), DSK was being interviewed by a BBC Radio journalist in the context of a documentary on the history of the IMF.[1] Toward the end of the program, I heard the distinctive voice of DSK responding to a journalist's question about how the global economy ought to be reconfigured in the aftermath of the 2008 Crisis. His astonishing answer was:

"Never in the past has an institution like the IMF been as necessary as it has been today... Keynes, sixty years ago, already foresaw what was needed; but it was too early. Now is the time to do it. And I think we are ready to do it!"

This was, in my estimation, a bombshell of a programmatic statement by the IMF's Managing Director. What was he referring to? He was, of course, referring to Keynes' powerfully put argument (in the context of the 1944 Bretton Woods conference) that a system of fixed exchange rates cannot survive for long without an automated mechanism that treats (a) systematic trade surpluses and (b) systematic trade deficits as the different sides of a problematic coin.