Dominique Strauss-Kahn

Dominique Strauss-Kahn (Neuilly-sur-Seine, Paris, 1949), a leader of France’s Socialist Party, is head of the International Monetary Fund. Strauss-Kahn was a member of the political generation that created the euro and someone who had the respect of the euro zone’s most senior politicians and officials. [1]

On May 14, 2011, he was arrested in connection with the alleged sexual assault of a housekeeper at a Manhattan hotel.

Some, including Mr. Strauss-Kahn’s wife, the American-born French television journalist Anne Sinclair, expressed disbelief in the charges and faith in her husband’s innocence. His lawyer has said he would plead not guilty. Others talked darkly of a possible “setup” of Mr. Sarkozy’s most prominent rival. [2]

Strauss-Kahn was born in the Paris suburb of Neuilly-sur-Seine to Jewish parents in 1949. His period as head at the IMF has not just been about steering the global economy out of a slump. It has also been about strengthening his CV as the most able French Socialist capable of challenging Nicolas Sarkozy for the French presidency in 2012... Strauss-Kahn, who was French finance minister from 1997 to 1999, made a splash when he arrived at the Davos World Economic Forum in January 2008 and stunned financial leaders by suggesting that what the world needed, to prevent it falling into deep recession, was a large fiscal stimulus. His diagnosis, some eight months before the collapse of Lehman Brothers, and more than a year ahead of Gordon Brown, was ahead of the game and a sharp divergence from IMF orthodoxy. Strauss-Kahn changed the IMF old solution for everything; he changed the so called fiscal consolidation a polite name for cutting budgets and raising taxes; together with John Lipsky, from a Jewish family in Iowa, he designed a new flexible loan facility. [3]

John Lipsky has been announced on 15 May 2011 to temporarily replace Strauss-Kahn as the IMF's CEO.