The International Monetary Fund has had a glorious few years. It has escaped its reputation as a thumbscrew merchant. Its resources have tripled. Its voting system has been reformed to reflect the rise of the emerging world. But the finance ministers gathering for the IMF’s spring meetings should not celebrate too loudly. The IMF can only be as coherent as they are – which means that, on many of the big issues, it remains incoherent.

Consider Europe’s mess. Greece and Ireland are saddled with debts that are almost certainly unpayable. These must be reduced, either by telling lenders that they won’t get all their money back or by an infusion of charitable funds. But Europe’s leaders lack the guts to inflict losses on investors, and fear a backlash from voters if they bail out the periphery. And so their policy, backed by the IMF, is to fudge: to lend enough “bail-out” money to ensure bond-holders get paid promptly, but at a price that won’t actually reduce the debt burden – to kick the can down the road.

The IMF is wrong to abet this cowardice, because it means unnecessarily prolonged austerity in the crisis countries and because the IMF is pouring capital into doomed programmes that (despite its preferred creditor status) it may not get back. But the incoherence doesn’t stop there. In a masterpiece of double-talk, Europe’s leaders are reassuring bond holders they will get all their money back – except that from 2013 onward, they might not. This is an absurd stance because markets are forward-looking: threats in the future affect bond prices now. Yet the double-talkers are powerful IMF shareholders, so the institution protests meekly and to no avail.