Rodrigo Rato Wants to Make News

Felix Salmon writes at RGE Monitor:

RGE - Rato "doesn't want" a global recession: How can you tell that Rodrigo Rato was a finance minister before he became managing director of the IMF, and not a central banker? He actually says something occasionally!

This time it's in an article to be published tomorrow in Börsen-Zeitung. He's particularly worried about the US current-account deficit, writing that

The debate on these imbalances should be taken very seriously because a disorderly resolution of the problem could spark a global recession which we don't want.

It seems that Rato wants to embrace his destiny: to turn the IMF into an institution which actually tries to do something about first-world global imbalances, rather than concentrating on emerging markets and occasionally kvetching ineffectually about the US. Of course, whether he'll succeed is another matter entirely.