Comparisons between the November 15 summit and the Bretton Woods conference in 1944 which created the fund were overblown, said Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the IMF’s managing director. The most the summit could achieve would be to bring together analysis already done and set working groups in motion for future agreements, possibly in six months or so.
"Expectations should not be oversold," Mr Strauss- Kahn told the Financial Times in an interview. "Things are not going to change overnight. Bretton Woods took two years to prepare. A lot of people are talking about Bretton Woods II. The words sound nice but we are not going to create a new international treaty."
The IMF managing director also sounded cautious over the idea of an "early warning system" for the global economy to predict financial crises - another repeated demand of Mr Brown. "I have heard contradictory things about it," he said. "I don’t think you can have a mechanical system with red lights and green lights and, sometimes, country by country, the light goes from green to red."
Mr Strauss-Kahn said the IMF could use its expertise to assess economies on a regional and a national level. But contrary to the views of some who have argued for the IMF to become a global financial regulator, he signalled that the fund would maintain its resistance to such a role, saying that its function was to provide analysis and lend to countries in trouble.
After several years sitting on the sidelines, the IMF has been brought suddenly back into action by the global financial crisis, which has spread rapidly to emerging market countries. Although its coffers are almost full, there has been some concern that funds could run out. Mr Brown has called for China and oil-exporting states to contribute more to IMF rescues and said that emerging countries deserved a bigger say in the running of multilateral institutions.
But Mr Strauss-Kahn said that while such money would be welcome, he had no intention of reopening the question of member countries’ votes at the IMF. The complex "quota" system that determines such votes was recently reformulated after years of debate, in which, officials involved say, the UK and France put up the stiffest resistance to change. "The voting power is determined by a very complex formula," Mr Strauss-Kahn added. "I don’t propose at all to change this."
