CITY AND SUBURBAN
Hello, Mr Hashimoto, welcome to Washington — we have something you want
CHRISTOPHER FILDES
he Chancellor and I are off to Washington for our annual hooley. It is arranged round the meetings of the Inter- national Monetary Fund and World Bank, we share it with some 10,000 others, and I wonder if Japan's finance minister will make it, or who he will turn out to be. Early this week a Mr Hashimoto had the job, but that has a limited predictive value — a geisha here, a share incentive scheme there, and it is all change once again. We are used, at these meetings, to finding that the Japanese minister has been unavoid- ably detained. Mr Hashimoto's brief is to bang the table and insist that Japan should have its rightful place in the fund — second, that is, only to the United States, and well above the present holder, Britain, Which bagged the place when the fund was created and has hung onto it ever since. His inexperience and the goings on in his government and party will not help his authority, and I forecast that the wily British will see Mr Hashimoto off. To rearrange the placings, Japan would have to subscribe new capital for the fund, and, as Nigel Lawson will argue, there wouldl first have to be agreement on how much new capital the fund needs. There will be wild disagreement. Mr Lawson scarcely thinks it needs any new capital, the fund's managing director (and the Japanese) want the capital doubled, and the Americans, With what amounts to a power of veto, have not made up their minds — and even then Congress would have to make up its mind to vote the money. That should see us through to another day. It is a pity, by more general standards, that the Japanese should cut such a modest figure at these meetings, and, indeed, in the executive of the fund itself. There is so much that the world's most successful economy could contribute to the fund and its policy- making — and not just by writing cheques. One of last year's finance ministers, Mr Miyazawa, talked in terms of using Japan's trade surpluses in a financial reconstruc- tion for the world's biggest debtor coun- tries. The idea of the Miyazawa plan was exhilarating, but the plan itself, when under scrutiny, seemed to dissolve. Cynical central bankers came to dismiss it as a cover story, told to help Japan towards its coveted second place. There will be no Miyazawa plan or Hashimoto initiative at this year's meetings, but when they are over (and when the Prime Minister has stopped lecturing the Japanese) it will be
time to ask Japan for a substantive involve- ment and commitment, and to welcome it. After all, we have something they want.
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