China is not all ‘doom and gloom — IMF’s Lagarde

“For all involved, the refugee crisis is immensely hard challenge”.

But global charity Oxfam criticized her for not speaking out on inequality in the world’s most unequal region, calling it “a missed opportunity”.

Turning to emerging economies, Lagarde said their room for policy manoeuvre to support demand is narrowing, with commodity exporters facing a painful adjustment due to rising financial vulnerabilities, low prices for their products, and deteriorating public finances.

The International Monetary Fund had put 2016 growth at 1.7% in its last forecast in July, before regional giant Brazil’s economy took a sharp turn for the worse with a slump in output, a ballooning corruption scandal and painful credit rating downgrade.

The International Monetary Fund head resembles a knuckle-rapping principal: lending desperate countries cash – but only if they eat their spinach, which can mean cutting government spending during an economic downturn. The IMF – whose “primary objective is to ensure the stability of the global monetary system” – made headlines earlier this year when it reported that governments spend $5.3 trillion in fossil fuel subsidies annually. Now, hundreds of thousands of mostly Syrian refugees have been pouring into Europe.

“Today the tax that you voted to get rid of is finally gone, a useless destructive tax which damaged jobs, which hurt families’ cost of living and which didn’t actually help the environment is finally gone”, former Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbot said when the tax was repealed in 2014. “It will not be without bumps on the road, but it’s a good evolution and it’s legitimate at that stage of development”. “I would say that it’s a recovery that is decelerating a bit”, she said, adding that it was expected to gain momentum next year.

But Lagarde is used to the hot seat.

The fifth annual slowdown for the once-mighty emerging markets and the commodities plunge underpinning it will be key agenda points as finance ministers from the leading industrialized and emerging economies gather Thursday for a G20 meeting, before issuing a statement Friday. In a few ways, though, she’s a trans-Atlantic hybrid: Her father was a university English teacher, while her mother taught school, and she grew up in Normandy, away from Paris-centered nationalism.

The scene is emblematic of global charity Oxfam´s recent finding that the richest one percent of the population in Latin America owns 41 percent of the region´s wealth.

“It’s not the old Latin America, it’s not the old IMF either”, Christine Lagarde, the fund’s managing director told journalists Thursday.