Her reference to the world of finance reminded me of a scene I had witnessed at the World Economic Forum in Davos, when the global financial crisis was at its worst and she was serving as France’s finance minister. Several of the world’s top bankers took the floor to congratulate her on the job she was doing. Lagarde brusquely asked them to stop applauding her and instead do their job and lend again. Credit needed to start flowing to stimulate the economy, but the banks, reluctant to take risks in such an uncertain environment, had effectively stopped lending and made the situation even worse. When I recounted this moment, she smiled and nodded. “Yes, I know. I didn’t make any friends that day.”

She said it bothered her that the burdens of the financial crisis have fallen disproportionately on the backs of the poor and middle class rather than the bankers and financiers who made many of the decisions at the root of the crash. But she claimed that this dynamic is changing, referencing new regulatory institutions and stricter capital requirements and government supervision for the financial sector in the United States and Europe: “Before, when a bank got in trouble and needed to be bailed out, it was done with taxpayers’ money. Now we have created a system that puts the burden on the shareholders of the financial institutions that get in trouble.”

Is the global financial system now safer than it was before 2008? “Yes. Governments now have the legal grounds, the reach, and the authority to act more effectively,” she said. Does the high concentration of financial assets in a few large institutions worry her? “Yes, for two reasons. As a young lawyer I was trained in competition law and I learned that concentration limits competition—and that is a bad thing. My second concern is that, having been in management positions, I think that organizations that grow very large and complicated become exceedingly difficult to manage and can also become unaccountable.”

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Lagarde has been criticized for being both too soft and too tough in her dealings with debt-strapped Greece, which last Thursday met a deadline to partially repay an IMF loan. For instance, Paulo Nogueira Batista, a Brazilian member of the IMF’s board, recently argued that the organization’s credibility has been damaged by its response to Greece’s economic crisis, noting that IMF “rules were bent and broken to suit the needs of the euro area.”

Lagarde strongly disagreed with Nogueira Batista’s analysis. “The statements of this gentleman that you refer to are inaccurate,” she said. “They are very biased and not based on facts. … We studied … the fiscal adjustments that we demanded in different countries and discovered that the volume and the nature of the effort expected of the Europeans was more than what we expected from the Middle East, for example; from countries like Jordan, Tunisia, or Morocco.”