Why Gita Gopinath's new job requires more than insightful economic thinking

Gopinath will have to be, if not a politician, then at least a diplomat, said Raghuram Rajan

Gita Gopinath has a knack for asking the kind of questions that, not so long ago, might have raised eyebrows inside the International Monetary Fund, where she just took over as chief economist.

What if more emerging markets actively managed their currencies, like China does? What if an influx of capital risks sapping a nation’s productivity, not boosting it?
 

Interrogating the data for answers, and using them to poke holes in the conventional playbooks for economic policy, was a hallmark of 47 year old Gopinath’s work at Harvard. Now she’ll be expected to recommend practical fixes –- at a turbulent moment