The shenanigans surrounding the International Monetary Fund's selection of a new managing director are fascinating. The outcome is not. According to the Intrade prediction market, France’s finance minister Christine Lagarde has a 90 per cent chance of victory, while her challengers Agustín Carstens and Stanley Fischer, central bank governors of Mexico and Israel respectively, each have a 5 per cent shot.

Those odds are about right. The G5 nations control 37.4 per cent of the votes on the IMF’s executive board, while five further votes cast by Europeans would bring the total to 57.4 per cent. If the west wants to continue European control of the IMF, other nations can do nothing about it.

So interesting questions will probably go unanswered. Should the IMF leadership go to an economist (Messrs Carstens and Fischer have doctorates from the University of Chicago and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology respectively), or a lawyer? And is prior service in the IMF, and dealing with the gritty realities of emerging markets crises a necessity?