Refusing to bow to a French court decision which was clearly politically motivated, the IMF directors supported Ms. Lagarde’s continuing leadership of the fund.

Dominique Strauss-Kahn was removed for transgressions that occurred while he was running the IMF.  If Ms. Lagarde was in fact guilty, events took place while she was still in the administration of Nicolas Sarkosy.

Since she has taken charge of the IMF, Ms. Lagarde has worked tirelessly on behalf of women and tried to bring attention to growing inequality in the world. Her work on behalf of these two critical issues and many others surely suggests that she is a good leader for the IMF.

The President-elect has made infrastructure repair a key item on his agenda for the first hundred days.  Democrats and Republicans both recognize the necessity for repairing infrastructure. For years there has been agreement.  And nothing has happened.

In the US, a small bill was passed recently in which the US Federal Reserve undertook the financing.  Most people agree that the Federal Reserve is not the institution to look to for money.  They have come to be the dollar of the last resort.

So where else can financing come from.  Trump has suggested private-public partnerships in which tax incentives bring private money to project.  In some cases this may work.  But there are some projects, like buses and bus routes in poorer cities, that are never going to make money and nonetheless need repair. Private companies are not going to be attracted to these kinds of projects.

The good news is that Senator Charles Schumer of New York and former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg want to see infrastructure repair go forward and have agreed to help figure out how to make this possible.

It seems likely in the US that Hillary Clinton will be elected President  next month.  Here is what here economic team may look like:  Larry Summers or Paul Krugman have been hovering around Mrs.Clinton during the long campaign.  They will both probably get positions in the administration.  Here are some other prospects who might be choices as head of Treasury and Labor, or as deputies in these executive agencies or advisors to the President..

Stephanie Kelton is an economics professor at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. She has served as the chief economist for the Democrats on the Senate Budget Committee, and as an advisor to Bernie Sanders.

Kelton is probably best known for her work on Modern Monetary Theory (MMT). It emphasizes that debt issued by the federal government doesn’t operate like any other form of debt.  This is because the government can’t create all the money it wants,  but can only create too-high inflation. And finally, that the amount of money the government puts into the economy via spending, versus the amount it takes out via taxes, is a key part of the overall ecology that determines the supply of jobs. And few people have done as much to game out the economic and policy consequences of those simple points as Kelton.

Joseph Stiglitz is an economics professor at Columbia University, a former CEA chair, and a Nobel Prize winner. He’s one of the most important economists in the world, and probably the one most unafraid to sit squarely and unabashedly to the left of mainstream economic orthodoxy.

Stiglitz takes aim at the forces creating inequality, and how they warp society and damage human lives. He understands that economics is created by politics: Inequality and stagnant wages are not the product of mere “natural” market forces, but of the way power is distributed throughout society and then used to shape the rules that govern economic outcomes.

Heather McGhee started at Demos, a left-leaning policy shop, way back in 2002; now she runs it. She was deputy director of domestic and economic policy for John Edwards’ 2008 presidential run, and helped engineer that campaign’s breakthrough effort to put the class divide at the center of U.S. politics. She works hard to marry racial and economic justice into one coherent goal, backed by serious policy substance.

Pavlina Tcherneva is the economics chair at Bard College, and a research scholar at the Levy Economics Institute. She’s cut from much the same cloth as Kelton, but Tcherneva has devoted particular energy to the idea o a job guarantee.

The presidential campaign in the US has encouraged the Democratic nominee, Mrs. Hillary Clinton, to superficially take on problems in the banking sector.   She is now talking about taking on Wells Fargo.

As we have previously reported, Wells Fargo encouraged employees to set up unauthorized bank accounts that their customers had not requested. Many underlings at the bank were dismissed over this action, which it is highly unlikely they undertook on their own.

Congress ordered its CEO to testify and we had a quasi-Japanese moment when he took the bullet.  He may have lost 60 million dollars, but millions of dollars  remain lining his pockets.

Since these kinds of actions, undertaken at a much higher level, and at the instigation of bank CEOs have gone on for decades and no other CEO, including Jamie Dimon of JP Morgan Chase, have gone unscathed, we wonder how seriously we can take the  curren flurry of sttention around banks and what any politician is willling to do to change the course of Big Banks in this country.

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In the current election cycle, Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen has been accused of inflating “a big, fat, ugly bubble” by keeping interest rates too low. Yellen couldn’t just shrug off the accusation, because only five days earlier three members of her own rate-setting group, the Federal Open Market Committee, had expressed the same idea in more delicate language. Loretta Mester, Esther George, and Eric Rosengren dissented from the FOMC decision to stand pat on rates, the committee announced, because they “preferred” to raise the federal funds rate a quarter percentage point at the meeting.

It isn’t easy running a central bank, especially during an election campaign, and even more so during this campaign, when there’s a deep division within the economics profession over whether U.S. interest rates are too low. As the uneven record of central banking goes to show, setting interest rates is a bewildering business. But exposing that bewilderment to the public makes the Fed seem ineffective, which renders it more vulnerable to attack.

The difficulty for Yellen is that although the Fed’s motivations aren’t political, its actions are inherently political in the sense that they affect the economy and thus create winners and losers. Keeping interest rates low helps incumbents by stimulating growth—but at the risk, some say, of generating unacceptably high inflation that would have to be quelled with high rates later.

Raising rates now presents its own difficulties. It could disrupt financial markets, shaking confidence. The next meeting of the FOMC concludes on Nov. 2. As of Sept. 28, financial markets saw only a 17 percent chance that the Fed would raise rates on that date, vs. a 53 percent chance of raising rates on Dec. 14. Why the low expectations for November? One reason is that there’s no press conference scheduled then, and Yellen uses press conferences to explain rate moves. But another reason is that markets don’t seem to think the Fed will call attention to itself by hiking rates six days before the election. Of course, not hiking could itself be read as a political decision.

The point is that anything the Fed does or doesn’t do is viewed through a political filter, even though Yellen said after the Sept. 21 FOMC meeting that “we do not discuss politics at our meetings, and we do not take politics into account in our decisions.”

Yellen is putting the best face on Fed dissent. She told reporters she thinks “it’s a very good thing that the FOMC is not a body that suffers from group-think.”

The deeper problem for the Fed is that its underregulation before the financial crisis and its overoptimism about the recovery have dulled its aura of expertise, says Robert Johnson, president of the Institute for New Economic Thinking.

Is retreating from the global economy the newer for US?

America’s economic woes are no secret. Nations like China are growing more and more economically powerful, while America is spiraling out of control. Losing an average of $600 billion dollars per year in trade deficits adds up, and the new low-wage economy neither brings in the needed tax dollars to run the country, nor gives citizens enough money to pay the bills. The more imports we buy, the more other nations prosper, and the more America falls deeper and deeper into third world status.

America’s Founding Fathers knew that foreign commerce was the key to a sustainable economy, but not by importing everything we need to live from producers overseas. A quick look at what they set up for a successful nation – and what we have given away – will show how Congress can easily fix the nation’s economic woes.

Retake control of the American economy  The U.S. Constitution states that “Congress shall have Power. . . To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations,” yet America has given up this right,

Restore tariffs and reform taxes  Every nation in the world has protective measures to ensure they take full advantage of product entering their countries. Again the US Constitution states: “The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises. . .”

By lowering income taxes and using a border-adjustable tax — the most successful tax in the world — American workers would not be punished for having jobs and foreign products entering the country could pay for the government through tariffs, as the Founding Fathers envisioned.

Stimulate the economy for job growth with the new influx of revenue  With 80% of stores like Walmart’s wares coming from China alone, the revenue earned through tariffs and a value-added tax would be enough to not only rebuild America’s crumbling infrastructure, but also rebuild manufacturing as well. The Constitution also grants Congress power to establish roads and “promote the Progress of Science.” This is money that could go towards the innovation America needs to bring back real jobs in manufacturing, R&D and more.

Are these answers? We do not know. Yet every politician in the US now has to address the issues they raise.