Given that his fall from grace came at the most awkward of times for the International Monetary Fund’s dealings with Greece and Portugal, many have written about Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s talents and major influence during recent negotiations. History, however, is more likely to remember him as the man who put the IMF on the road to decline, by his misguided handling of the eurozone debt crisis.

Mr Strauss-Kahn’s decision to treat the crisis as a matter of liquidity rather than solvency led the IMF to eschew any notion of debt restructuring, or exiting from the euro, as a solution to the periphery’s public sector and external imbalance problems. Rather, he opted for draconian fiscal tightening and radical structural reform as a cure-all for Greece, Ireland and Portugal.

Experience with such policies in Argentina in 1999-2001 and in Latvia in 2008-09 should have informed the IMF that, under the euro – the most fixed of exchange rate systems – such a policy was bound to produce the deepest of economic recessions. The fund should also have anticipated that deep recessions would erode those countries’ tax bases and undermine their political willingness to stay the course of adjustment.