[ CHAPTER 5 ]
Show Me the Money
THE SMALL Washington-bound plane that departed Montreal on the evening of October 25, 2000, was loaded with members of the world’s economic policy elite, who had been attending a meeting of officials from major industrial and emerging-market nations. Among those on the flight were Lawrence Summers, U.S. Treasury secretary; Alan Greenspan, chairman of the Federal Reserve Board; and Horst Köhler, managing director of the IMF. So distinguished was the passenger manifest that others on board could not help cracking a joke or two about the importance of a safe landing for the stability of the global economy.
Another passenger, less widely known, was Daniel Marx, Argentina’s finance secretary, a former banker who, in ...