![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/05\/Kemal-Dervis.jpg\" "\\"Kemal-Dervis\\"")
While Dominique Strauss-Kahn is waiting in jail, Treasury Secretary Geithner suggested DSK to step aside. There are a few leading candidates for this position. One of them is Turkey\u2019s Kemal Dervis. He is the former head of United Nations Development Programme, and the Vice-President for Poverty Reduction and Economic Management at the World Bank. He is qualified for the position but his chances are really slim.<\/p>\n
This didn\u2019t stop the Turkey\u2019s ruling party and its finance minister, Mehmet Simsek, from sabotaging Kemal Dervis\u2019 slim chances of becoming IMF\u2019s next president. This is the crab mentality at its rawest form. A decade ago Turkey got into a Greek-style budget deficit problem where almost everybody expected Turkey to default. Turkish Prime Minister asked Dervis to leave his post at the World Bank and help him with the budget and debt crisis. Dervis cut a deal with the IMF and went on to implement the plan. He was so successful that Turkey didn\u2019t default on its debt and started to grow at a very healthy pace again. However, Erdogan\u2019s AKP won the elections in 2002 and reaped all the benefits of Dervis\u2019 hard work. Between 2002 and 2007, the Turkish economy grew by more than 7% annually, thanks to declining interest rates and the implementation of an IMF-backed programme that was struck by Dervis. Turkish economy went back to its mediocre performance after the IMF agreement ended in early 2008.<\/p>\n
Erdogan\u2019s AKP doesn\u2019t have any credible alternatives in Turkey and they are expected to win the 2011 elections. However, they are worried that if Dervis becomes the next chief of the IMF, he will probably be an unbeatable candidate in 2015. That\u2019s why they are trying to pull him down like crabs pulling down other crabs in a boiling pot. That\u2019s why Mehmet Simsek, who was just a managing director at Merrill Lynch before he became Turkey\u2019s finance minister and Erdogan\u2019s puppet, announced his candidacy to run the IMF.<\/p>\n
The New York Times didn\u2019t waste this opportunity and made fun of Mehmet Simsek by saying \u201cAmong some potential candidates, modesty was not a characteristic widely on display.\u201d The funny thing is Dani Rodrik, a Turkish economist at Harvard, published an article yesterday supporting Kemal Dervis\u2019 candidacy. It\u2019s well known that Rodrik doesn\u2019t like the Erdogan government and he saw this as an opportunity to make a jab. Unfortunately Simsek announced his ridiculous candidacy to give the Germans and the French enough ammunition to shot Dervis\u2019 slim chances down.<\/p>\n
via IMF\u2019s New Chief, New York Times and Turkey\u2019s Crab Mentality – Insider Monkey.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
While Dominique Strauss-Kahn is waiting in jail, Treasury Secretary Geithner suggested DSK to step aside. There are a few leading candidates for this position. One of them is Turkey\u2019s Kemal Dervis. He is the former head of United Nations Development Programme, and the Vice-President for Poverty Reduction and Economic Management at the World Bank. He […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":83,"featured_media":33880,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[89],"tags":[995,5558],"class_list":["post-33878","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-turkey","tag-imf","tag-kemal-dervis"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33878","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/83"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33878"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33878\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/33880"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33878"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33878"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33878"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}