ABSTRACT
The men who established the international financial institutions shared a fundamental belief. The Bank and the Fund need to operate too in the so-called 'globalised world' of fast moving ideas and capital. There are five actors on the International Monetary Fund's (IMF's) stage, the management, the staff, the Board of Executive Directors, the Board of Governors and the International Monetary and Finance Committee, formerly the Interim Committee. The fundamental belief - the Bank and the Fund are instruments which permit man to be master of his economic fate - was evident from the earliest years of their foundation at the end of the Second World War. Indeed, the belief in the value of international organisations, economic, political and military, was characteristic of the spirit of the time. Those years saw creative acts of statesmanship in world politics, in international economic policy and in regional military and economic cooperation.
