France's Christine Lagarde A Front Runner for Head of IMF

From left, Timothy F. Geithner, Christine Lagarde and Dominique Strauss-Kahn last month.Mike Theiler/ReutersRedTracker| French finance minister Christine Lagarde is a key contender to replace Dominique Strauss-Kahn as head of the International Monetary Fund. DSK resigned his post last night and will appear in New York state court today for a new bail hearing. He will appear tomorrow to hear if the grand jury has agreed that he be held for trial.

Lagarde appeared here in New York for Tina Brown’s Women in the World conference and she was #26 on last November’s 2010 Foreign Policy 100 Global Thinkers list.

Not afraid to speak her mind, Christine Lagarde frowned in the World Economic Forum last January when Robert E. Diamond Jr., chief executive of Barclays and ‘one of the most powerful bankers in the world’ writes the NTimes, thanked regulators and finance ministers for their work after the financial crisis.

Ms. Lagarde looked him in the eye. “The best way for the banking sector to say thank you would be to actually have, you know, good financing of the economy, sensible compensation systems in place and reinforcement of their capital,” she replied, to a burst of applause.

Former IMF chief economist Kenneth S. Rogoff welcomes the idea of a woman running the IMF but says gender is only part of her appeal.

“She is enormously impressive, politically astute and a strong personality,” he said. “At finance meetings all over the world, she is treated practically like a rock star.”

To be nonpolitic, the emerging countries including Brazil who now has a woman president at the helm, are tired of white men running the global financial show. Read on at NYTimes.