When Christine Lagarde became the first female finance minister of a major global economy, it’s a measure of how much happier the world was back then that media interest focused chiefly on her talent for synchronised swimming. She was the foxy Frenchwoman who’d won medals in the national team in her teens, then worked her way up to chair an American law firm in Chicago, before being invited back to Paris in 2005 as trade minister and promoted two years later to the Treasury. Journalists had lots of fun picturing her upside down in a pool, wearing waterproof lipstick and a nose clip – and Lagarde played along with the joke, crediting the sport with teaching her a useful political skill: «To grit your teeth and smile.»
Christine Lagarde: can the head of the IMF save the euro? Leer más