After eight years as managing director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Christine Lagarde will become the president of the European Central Bank on November 1. Her tenure at the Fund was not without mishap, but she served the institution and became a consummate diplomat, skillful communicator, and substantive innovator. Nevertheless, the IMF remains vulnerable to the centrifugal forces affecting the global economy and imperiling financial cooperation. Lagarde was a unique IMF leader: its first female head, a former French finance minister who had not spent decades engaged in international finance diplomacy, ... (full story)