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Schweitzer, his wife Catherine and their daughter Juliette, 13, have come to love the U.S. They live in the same whitewashed brick house he occupied during a 1947-49 stint as a financial counselor to the French embassy. (It just happened to be for sale again when he returned.) Their son Louis, 25, is a student in Paris. Schweitzer finds Washington social life a bore, likes to putter in his garden, walk with his family in his spare time. He has become a fan of hamburgers, motels and dry martinis. At home, he drinks California wine ("to help with your balance of payments"); at IMF's 13-story office compound two blocks from the White House, he imbibes French vintages ("be cause the cost won't show on your payments accounts").
Both as a diplomat and financial fire man, Schweitzer has carried IMF's prestige and power to a new eminence. Example: in 1949, when Britain devalued the pound from $4.04 to $2.80, the IMF learned about it only belatedly. Last year the British consulted with the fund for weeks before making up their minds how much devaluation to risk. Afterward, the IMF gave the U.K. a hefty $1.4 billion stand-by credit to help it get back on its feet. As one condition, IMF aides scrutinized and gave tacit approval to the draconian British budget introduced last week (see THE WORLD) before the Labor Government dared present it to Parliament. Had the IMF considered the British economic cutback too meager, it could have canceled the loan and so forced Britain at least to the brink of a second devaluation. The price Britain is paying for its profligacy is a partial loss of economic sovereignty to one of the most effective international organizations in history. Schweitzer considers it a badge of honor to have been denounced lately in Parliament. That, he says, is the kind of brickbat he usually wins only from backward countries.
Schweitzer's main concern nowadays is to complete the biggest change in the IMF's 24 years: creation of a new international money — paper gold — to take the pressure off dollars, pounds and real gold in bankrolling world trade and investment. It goes by the clumsy name of "Special Drawing Rights," or SDKs for short. Actually, SDKs would have some characteristics of currency and some of credit. They would consist of wholly artificial reserves, carried on the IMF's books as a separate fund and backed by pledges of contributions from IMF members in their own currencies. Nations would automatically participate in accordance with their regular IMF deposits; the U.S., for example, provides 24.59% of the fund's resources, the Common Market 17%. But only 30% of the issued SDKs would ever need to be repaid; the balance would become a permanent increase in each country's liquid assets. SDKs would exist only on the books of the IMF and its member nations. Only governments would be eligible to use them—and only to settle debts (not, for example, to buy goods or to raid another country's stock of gold). Ordinary tourists and businessmen would still settle their bills in the familiar national currencies.