Gita Gopinath To Get Tough Economic Landscape as New IMF Chief

Preparing to leave the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in the next few weeks, IMF Chief Economist Maury Obstfeld told a group of journalists that his successor is going to face a series of frontline issues including the ongoing trade tensions, climate change, some kind of a cyber event, and income distribution.

The 46-year-old economist, who will assume the office in January, is the second Indian to be appointed to the role of chief economist after Raghuram Rajan.

Having personally known Gopinath for nearly two decades now, Obstfeld asserted that the new chief economist would successfully come out with solutions to the problems that he is leaving behind.

"I think she's going to be a fantastic appointment," said Obstfeld, who is now headed to the University of California, Berkley to return to his passion of teaching and research.

"I've actually known her since roughly 1996 or 1997. Ken Rogoff and I did a graduate textbook in international macroeconomics back then and very last thing we did in the book was the publisher said, 'you need problems at the end of the chapters for the graduate students to solve', he said.

When they finished the book, the publishers IMPF press asked them to write some problems, which they did. And once book was out, the publisher came to them and said that they need to do a solution manual for the problems.

"We kind of said, oh, how are we going to do that? We don't even know if we can solve these problems. And Kevin said, well, I have a this really smart graduate student and she can help us do this," Obstfeld said, recollecting the conversation he had some two decades ago.

"I asked, what's her name? He said Gita Gopinath," Obstfeld told reporters, adding that Gopinath then worked on the solutions manual. "She was great. I'm not surprised that she went on to an illustrious, illustrious career," Obstfeld said.

Responding to a question as to what has changed in the last three years, the period he has been the IMF's chief economist, he said Gopinath is going to face a world that looks a little different from the one he came into.

"When I showed up, the big challenge was China seem to be slowing, how is it handling its exchange rate? But Europe had come through the euro crisis US growth, you know, 2015 was a pretty good year, so things didn't look bad, he said.

"Then in sharp succession you have Brexit, you have the troubles in Europe that we've been discussing. You have, the US moving to a very different view of the international order that in some sense has increased policy uncertainty a lot in the global economy. And so this is going to be a tough landscape to navigate, I think," Obstfeld felt.