U.S. action against IMF chief exposes anti-China hysteria: expert

BEIJING, Sept. 29 (Xinhua) -- The allegations recently leveled by some U.S. politicians against International Monetary Fund (IMF) Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva lay bare their "anti-China hysteria" and may threaten the fund's multilateralism and global financial stability, a U.S. expert has said.

The attack against Georgieva "is not really about the alleged sanctity of World Bank data or about the quality of her management," but "about the role of China in a Washington-based multilateral institution," said Jeffrey Sachs, director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University, in an article published Monday by the Financial Times.

"Georgieva is receiving McCarthyite treatment of the kind for which Washington has been notorious in the past," he noted.

Sachs warned the IMF's multilateralism is at risk should the U.S. politicians succeed in ousting Georgieva from her post with their "insubstantial" accusations.

"If the U.S. government, at the behest of congressional hotheads, brings down Georgieva, it would prove conclusively that the IMF is a U.S.-directed institution with the mere trappings of multilateralism," he said.

This scenario would be "devastating" for global trust and financial stability, he added. "We would be back soon to the naked financial and monetary nationalism of the 1930s that deepened the Great Depression and set the world on the path to total war."

He called on the IMF to "not capitulate to anti-China congressional hysteria."