Christine Lagarde - The Magic 7

NATIONAL PRESS CLUB BALLROOM, WASHINGTON, D.C. WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 15, 2014 Good afternoon, and thank you very much for having me with you. I would like to thank the National Press Club and especially President Angela Greiling Keane, for not only inviting me to this prestigious venue, but essentially presenting the outline of what I want to talk to you about now. So it’s as if we had prepared that together, which we have not. Now, let me first of all, of course, begin by wishing you all a happy new year. I guess it’s still time to do that, given that we are just exactly halfway through between our western new year and the lunar new year, which will loom in a few weeks’ time. I think it’s also appropriate to wish ourselves a happy new year given what I would like to talk to you about, which has to do with the global economy and what we should expect for 2014. Now, I’m going to test your numerology skills by asking you to think about the magic seven, okay? Most of you will know that seven is quite a number in all sorts of themes, religions. And I’m sure that you can compress numbers as well. So if we think about 2014, all right, I’m just giving you 2014, you drop the zero, 14, two times 7. Okay, that’s just by way of example, and we’re going to carry on. (Laughter) So 2014 will be a milestone and hopefully a magic year in many respects. It will mark the hundredth anniversary of the First World War back in 1914. It will note the 70thanniversary, drop the zero, seven-- of the Breton Woods conference that actually gave birth to the IMF. And it will be the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, 25th, okay. It will also mark the seventh anniversary of the financial market jitters that quickly turned into the greatest global economic calamity since the Great Depression. The crisis still lingers. Yet, optimism is in the air. We’ve left the deep freeze behind us and the horizon looks just a bit brighter. So my hope and my wish for 2014 is 4that after those seven miserable years, weak and fragile, we have seven strong years. I don’t know whether the G7 will have anything to do with it, or whether it will be the G20. I certainly hope that the IMF will have something to do with it.