Money: It Could Be Dawn

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Sitting with the Western world's chief central bankers as they weighed the gold crisis last week in Washington was a saturnine Frenchman who still bears the scars of his days as a Buchenwald prisoner. Though Pierre-Paul Schweft-zer, 55, spoke rarely, he got undivided attention when he did. As managing director of the 107-nation International Monetary Fund—which acts as an arbiter of exchange rates, guardian of fiscal good behavior among sovereign states, and rescue squad for countries in financial trouble—Schweitzer holds a pivotal role not only in the present struggle to...