and the challenges she'll face in office with eswar prasad, a former i.m.f. official who's now at cornell university. he's also a senior fellow at the brookings institution. and scheherazade rehman, director of the european union research center, and professor of international finance at george washington university. it's good to have you both back with us again. eswar, let me begin with you. remind us, what does the international monetary fund do and what's the job of its director. >> the international monetary fund does two things. one, it lends money to countries in trouble. but more importantly in the new world economy what it does is it tells countries what they should be doing with their policies. it evaluates their financial systems and evaluates their policies, talks about whether those policies are good for the country but more importantly also for the global economy what is somewhat strangely called surveillance. that's a key function. managing that becomes very important because of course the technical staff of the fund are very qualified. they can