RIGGED SYSTEM

Brazil's Finance Minister Guido Mantega said Brazil backed Lagarde because she vowed to continue raising the profile of emerging markets. "Our support is for her to be a manager not of Europe's problems but of the world's. We will be watching out for this from the first day," Mantega said at a regional trade meeting in Paraguay. In justifying why India had gone with Lagarde in the end, Indian Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee told Reuters it was in part because it wanted to be part of the concensus that had formed around her. Speaking while on a visit to Washington, Mukherjee said the IMF's selection process should have been more transparent but he believed Lagarde was a worthy candidate. Arvind Subramanian, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute in Washington, said emerging economies had missed a golden opportunity to force change at the IMF helm by failing to rally around Carstens or by putting up their own consensus Candidate. It is a rigged system that needs to change but ... The only reason the outcome didn't match what (developing nations) wanted was because emerging market countries did not grab the opportunity," Subramanian said. Global development group Oxfam said Lagarde's appointment was "farcical" and had damaged the credibility of the IMF. There were noises made about openness, but the decision was made before the candidates were interviewed," said Sarah Wynn-Williams, Oxfam's head of relations with the IMF and World Bank.