Christine Lagarde’s visit to Moscow

Russia is the first country that Christine Lagarde visited as the official managing director of the International Monetary Fund. Unlike her predecessors, Ms Lagarde’s candidature was fully supported by the Russian government this July.

During her official visit to Moscow, Lagarde met with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev as well as the first vice-PM Igor Shuvalov and with Acting Finance Minister Anton Siluanov. Later, Ms Lagarde gave a press-conference to Russian journalists:

"I had an opportunity to listen to various representatives of Russian government. I had very constructive discussions with the President of Russian Federation Dmitry Medvedev, with the first vice-FM, Mr Shuvalov, and with Acting Finance Minister, Mr Siluanov. We discussed essentially tree urgent issues: the current state of the global economy and the threats it may pose countries like Russia; the economic policy of Russia that it may enact to counteract these threats as well as the role of Russia as a member of international community and as one of the leading members of the IMF. Russia is a key player here, it creates a bridge between Europe and Asia; it is one of the leading states in the BRIC organization and a major producer of oil and gas. Today we came to an agreement that we will make our relations deeper, that we will exchange ideas on budgetary and tax policy. For the coming years our governments will decide who they will coordinate their budgetary and tax policy; and IMF will be glad to offer its assistance by offering all its knowledge and experience that our organization has gathered. We will offer this assistance through our Moscow office.

As far as Greece is concerned my answer is simple: from the IMF’s point of view, we need a greater political clarity – that is our condition for any further negotiations or fund allocations. As you know, the meeting of the G20 ministers is scheduled for February and I know of no other meetings planned. As for the budgetary policy, we’ve discussed this issue pretty thoroughly on the meetings I had during this visit.

Russian authorities, Central Bank and Finance Ministry’s treasury, are managing a great volume of necessary work.  We think that some finance anchors are necessary for stabilization and political development. From our point of view the country needs two of them – first one for monetary and loan policy and the second one, of course, to limit the inflation. We think it’s a good idea to create such an anchor in the range of 4 to 5 billion rubles. As for the budgetary policy, we believe that the non-oil-related budged deficiency should be stabilized at the level of 4%. I think that while approaching these issues we reached mutual understanding and agreement with the Russian government.

As for the reforms:  in any country, it is better to conduct such reforms with the approval of the parliament as well as with the sincere support of the general population. We have some examples of countries that we worked with where such an approach proved to be quite rewarding. One of the most recent examples is Island."