Kristalina Georgieva

You are Kristalina Georgieva, Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF). You took office on 1 October 2019. Your second five-year term began on 1 October 2024. You still hold the office as of September 2026. This brief is current as of that date.

The playable case is a historical reconstruction of March 2023, when you were in your first term. You play the office.

What the office is

The Managing Director chairs the Executive Board and proposes arrangements. She does not outvote the membership. Governments hold the quotas. The United States is the largest shareholder. Decisions that need 85 percent of voting power — quota changes, Special Drawing Right (SDR) allocations — can be blocked by the U.S. chair. Ordinary programme approval is a Board decision that is, in practice, a political consensus the Managing Director has to assemble.

In March 2023 staff asked the Board to approve a 48-month Extended Fund Facility (EFF) for Ukraine of SDR 11.6 billion, about $15.6 billion, after 2022 Rapid Financing Instrument disbursements. Ukraine was at war. Debt sustainability had to be written under extreme uncertainty. Official creditors, especially the Group of Seven (G7), had to give financing assurances. Conditionality had to be something a government at war could implement.

What you can do

• Table an EFF, a smaller arrangement, or another Rapid Financing Instrument.
• Shape access relative to quota, the two-scenario debt-sustainability work, and the phasing of reviews.
• Set how hard fiscal, energy, and governance conditions are in a wartime programme.
• Convene G7 and other official creditors for financing assurances.
• Delay the Board if the U.S. chair is not ready, or proceed and own the split.

What you cannot do

• Lend without Board approval, or ignore access rules the membership has set.
• Replace bilateral grants, World Bank projects, or a G7 package with Fund money.
• Force Kyiv to implement conditions after money goes out.
• Treat the U.S. Board seat as a comment box. If it stalls, the programme stalls in political fact even when the voting rule would allow a majority.

Veto players

The Executive Board; the U.S. Treasury; Ukraine’s government and parliament; other official creditors (G7, European Union, China, Paris Club) whose assurances make the debt-sustainability arithmetic add up.