ALEX BRUMMER: IMF boss Kristalina Georgieva revisiting Brexit during coronavirus crisis suggests she hasn't quite washed away her EU past

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The International Monetary Fund deserves credit for not holding back on highlighting the stunning £7 trillion loss of global output caused by Covid-19. 

Given the technical challenges of a worldwide virtual meeting of 189 countries, managing director Kristalina Georgieva handled matters well. 

Georgieva is an experienced public servant, having occupied top roles at the EU and World Bank. But she may lack the political guile of her predecessors, the disgraced Dominique Strauss-Kahn, who was in charge during the Great Recession, or Christine Lagarde, who bailed out of the IMF for a central banking role in Frankfurt. 

Not amused: Kristalina Georgieva is an experienced public servant, having occupied top roles at the EU and World Bank

Getting Americans to agree to anything at present is a nightmare with Donald Trump in the White House. Unimpressive and tainted by Beijing, the World Health Organisation has been hapless during the current pandemic. But it was not the right moment for the US to slash funding. Now the US is cutting up rough with the IMF. 

It is refusing to repeat actions taken at the time of the Great Recession when shareholders agreed to print money by allowing the Fund to issue new special drawing rights (the IMF's own currency). 

The principal reason for US dissent is that it does not want to see extra resources raised end up in the hands of China. Trump does not always oppose what the Bretton Woods institutions do. The US supported the last capital increase for the World Bank's lending arm to poor countries after former president Jim Yong Kim cultivated first daughter Ivanka Trump. 

It is also clunky for Georgieva to draw the IMF back into the Brexit debate. Lagarde's comment that Brexit would be 'pretty bad, very bad' for Britain was partisan and damaged her independence. The IMF subsequently changed its views arguing that most of the economic damage done by the UK's June 2016 vote to the leave the EU had already been absorbed. 

Georgieva scratched at an old wound when she told the BBC that the UK should seek an extension beyond the December 31 transition period for leaving the EU, making matters tougher for Britain in the age of coronavirus. What really damaged the UK's economy was three years of dither. 

Georgieva's intervention shows political naivety and suggests she hasn't quite washed away her past as the EU vice-president for budget. Brussels gave the managing director her job and she doesn't seem to have forgotten.

Cheat sheet 

Contrast the behaviour of activist investor Edward Bramson in his dealings with Barclays and Stelios Haji-Ioannou at Easyjet. 

Bramson doesn't much like the way Barclays chief executive Jes Staley has been behaving, but accepts that the middle of a health emergency is not the right time to unsettle leadership at a major global bank. 

As founder and biggest investor at Easyjet, Stelios shows no such restraint. The airline has unveiled a sensible strategy for survival in the age of coronavirus by securing funding which should see it safely through the year, reining back on expansion and setting out a social distancing strategy for when the lockdown eases. 

This includes removing middle seats, a move which would feed straight through to lower profits unless the pricing model is tweaked. The Stelios response is to label chief executive Johan Lundgren and chairman John Barton scoundrels and demand their removal. His beef is that too much cash will flow to Airbus, flying half-empty planes will burn cash and the fleet of 337 Airbus planes is too large. Maybe. 

But with costs suppressed by lower oil prices and a third (not one half) of seats empty, turning a profit, even if smaller than in the past, should be possible. Holding capacity steady – rather than cutting operations during a managed recovery – can hardly be considered deceptive or rash.

Post haste 

Three Royal Mail workers sadly have succumbed to Covid-19 in the lockdown. The difference of circumstances for key postal workers and chief executive Rico Back, holed up in his luxury Swiss apartment, could not be more stark. 

Chairman Keith Williams should immediately organise an airlift of Back from Zurich to London and order him to take a pay cut. 

Faffing around with pay committees should not be an option. If plane-loads of Romanian seasonal workers can be brought in to harvest strawberries, it shouldn't be hard to repatriate the Royal Mail One. Just do it.