The appointment last week of France’s finance minister, Christine Lagarde, as managing director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) brings an end to a race which, for all its illusions of drama and contest, was in fact entirely predictable.

The so-called Bretton Woods institutions — the World Bank and the IMF, set up in the New Hampshire town of that name by the Allied Powers of World War II in 1944 — have long rested on a cosy deal within the Western world, under which the former would always be headed by an American and the latter by a West European.