In a few days, the governors of the International Monetary Fund will endorse a package to conclude the second and final (for now) stage of the governance reform initiated in 2006 by Rodrigo de Rato, then managing director. Two years later, all the dogged efforts and the countless meetings to hammer out new and more transparent criteria for allocating voting power within the institution will have produced a minuscule shift of about 2.7 per cent in favour of developing and emerging-market countries. So there will be little to celebrate when finance ministers and central bank governors gather in Washington on Saturday for the IMF’s ministerial meeting.

The recent outcome makes it clear that Europe has little or no strategy where the IMF is concerned. This reflects the growing disconnection between the internal and the external institutional frameworks for eurozone monetary policy. Whereas the European Central Bank has enjoyed an effective delegation to preserve the internal purchasing power of the euro, the same cannot be said about the management of the eurozone’s external monetary policy.