EMERGING-MARKET FINANCE has more than its fair share
of polarizing personalities. Some people, such as former
Mexican finance minister Angel Gurria, are universally
admired. Others, including Carnegie Mellon economics
professor and former CSFB banker Adam Lerrick, are seen as
highly divisive.
So eyebrows were raised last month when Lerrick and Gurria
announced that they had gone into business together, setting up a
for-profit negotiating team designed to represent European holders
of defaulted Argentine debt.
The two are not natural bedfellows: Gurria admits that "when we
first met to discuss these problems, we were looking at them from
relatively different points of view". Lerrick is famous as a
right-winger who believes that the public sector should drastically
reduce its role in emerging markets; he was the prime mover of the
Meltzer Commission report, which advocated sweeping changes at the
IMF. Gurria, on the other hand, has had a very close relationship
with the highest levels of the official...
