Money: The Paper Solution

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Picaresque Assets. True to Gaullist form, the French insisted that the U.S. must end that deficit before any S.D.R. are created, but their stand won scant support from other countries. More worrisome was French Finance Minister Michel Debré's demand (supported by West Germany) that IMF's charter be revised to give the Common Market veto power over all future expansion of IMF reserves and the use of IMF loans by debt-laden countries. "If we don't get our way," threatened one European finance chief, "the Americans aren't going to get any monetary reform in the foreseeable future."

Delegates swept that squabble under the rug by calling for a report on rules changes next March. Meanwhile, they proceeded with their annual meeting's more pleasant activities: serious private talk well moistened at lunches, cocktail bashes and elegant dinners. To provide a suitably opulent setting, Brazil hastily completed the late architect Affonso Eduardo Reidy's beachfront Museum of Modern Art, despite some peculiarly Latin difficulties. University students wrecked the bulldozers that were about to demolish their subsidized, low-price restaurant, which blocked access to the imposing museum. Brazil's central bank bought off the students with a promise of free meals for 20 days, and quickly built a substitute restaurant near by.

With considerable finesse, the bank also thwarted efforts to drive Rio's ubiquitous ladies of the night off the streets. Convinced that the girls are a picaresque asset that visiting bankers would want to see, if not buy, the chief of the foreign-capital division struck a deal with the streetwalkers: the girls would be unbothered if they policed themselves and kept their diseased and theft-prone sisters out of action for the week.