MONEY: The $60 Billion Question

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A New Chief? The U.S. at last seems more willing to discuss what its trading partners desire most—an eventual return to some form of convertibility—if other nations make concessions. Washington wants Europe and Japan to reduce trade barriers against America's exports. The U.S. also wants more freedom to make frequent, small changes in the value of the dollar to help American competitiveness in world markets. In fact, there is some support among IMF members for an enforced system in which changes in currency values would occur often and automatically, on the basis of objective measures like rises and declines in each nation's reserve assets. Individual countries, especially the U.S., would have to surrender to an international authority some sovereignty over their own currencies.

In this delicate period of political-economic tradeoffs, the U.S. has concluded that the IMF needs a new chief. Rather brusquely, Shultz told Pierre-Paul Schweitzer, the independent but not always effective Frenchman who has been IMF managing director since 1963, that he should step down rather than stand for a third five-year term in 1973. U.S. officials contend that Schweitzer lacks the necessary leadership. The charge seems particularly odd considering that Schweitzer exercised leadership—and irritated the U.S. in his timing—by proposing last September a plan for revaluation of currencies that strongly resembled the one adopted in December. The leading candidates to be Schweitzer's successor are two central bankers: Holland's Jelle Zijlstra and Italy's Rinaldo Ossola. Besides leadership, the new director will need a large measure of patience. At the very best, real money reform still seems two or three years away.