January 27, 2021
MS. GODDARD: I have the honor of introducing our moderator, Professor Joe Joyce, who will then introduce our esteemed speaker, Kristalina Georgieva.
Professor Joe Joyce is the M. Margaret Ball, Professor of International Relations, in the Department of Economics at Wellesley College. Professor Joyce is an expert on issues of financial globalization. His book, "The IMF and Global Financial Crises: Phoenix Rising," was published by Cambridge University Press in 2015, and his articles have appeared in a range of top academic journals. Professor Joyce was also the founding faculty director of the Albright Institute. I want now to turn it over to Professor Joyce, who will introduce our speaker, Kristalina Georgieva.
PROFESSOR JOYCE: Thank you, Stacey. As we begin, I do want to point out that I think we all owe a great amount of gratitude to Stacey Goddard, as well as Rebecca Gordon, the Program Director.
When we started the Institute, we certainly knew there would be challenges. I assure you, we never saw a pandemic coming. And the work that Stacey and Rebecca have done this year in organizing this year's Institute, bringing together the Albright fellows, the speakers, and everything else has been incredible.
This afternoon we are very pleased to have and to welcome to Wellesley College, Kristalina Georgieva, who is the Managing Director of the IMF.
Ms. Georgieva grew up in Bulgaria, when it was still a communist country and received her Master and Doctoral degrees from the University of Norwalk and National World Economy in Sofia. She came to the World Bank in 1993, where she rose to become Vice President and Corporate Secretary. From the years 2010 to 2016, she was at the European Commission, where she served as a Commissioner for Humanitarian Aid and crisis Management and became Vice President of the European Commission. She returned to the World Bank as its first Chief Executive Officer in 2017; and in 2019, served as interim president, and now of course is at the IMF. Therefore, she has an extraordinary amount of expertise and knowledge of international issues and efforts to address them.
Let me start off by simply saying, we welcome you to the Albright Institute. Thank you so much for joining us.
MS. GEORGIEVA: Thank you very much for the invitation. I have huge respect for the person whose name the Institute carries. Our Secretary Albright is for eastern European women, like me, a beacon of hope that everything is possible. And I am also a big admirer of Wellesley College.
As I was preparing for the visit today, I checked on what's new about Wellesley. And one of the interesting facts I learned was that Wellesley is number one in happiness among freshman. A happy place usually creates tremendous opportunities for aspirational thinking, and I want to benefit of it as we have a discussion today.
PROFESSOR JOYCE: Let's begin. I think you know that the theme of this year's Albright Institute is the need to rebuild global institutions. And as I said in my introduction, you, yourself, has had an incredible, perhaps, unique range of experience at the Fund, at the Bank, the European Commission.
What do you think these agencies need to do to remain credible and to be relevant for dealing with the various international challenges that we face? Is a new Bretton Woods needed?
MS. GEORGIEVA: Let me start with the simplest and most straightforward answer: What do we need to do? Do the right thing, not what is easy, but what is right. And, obviously, what is the right thing changes with time. Because the world changes and the demand on the institutions, what they are supposed to do, that also changes.
Let me give you my take from many, many years and you mentioned that of experience in international forum. First, we do need global institutions because so many of the problems we face are global, or even if they are local, they exist in so many places that learning from experience, having this transmission line that institutions like the IMF or the World Bank offer is so very important.
Second, they do need to constantly aspire to lean towards the problems of tomorrow rather than to be stuck in solving the problems of yesterday, and do it in a way that is adapted to this changing world of ours. Third, our mandate constantly evolves, and we should not be afraid of recognizing that. The governance of these institutions also has to change with the world we live in, and that has been in my experience the toughest change to make.
What we struggle with is tradition and ability to bring everybody's perspective to bear. But when we do so, we risk to go to the lowest possible denominator, and we risk to not make the changes in our governance that are required.
Being so very fortunate now to lead the IMF in a truly consequential time, I take as a huge responsibility to lean forward towards what the world needs from an institution like the IMF, carry the membership with us, and make sure that as we strive to stay together, we don't fall for the lowest possible denominator of what we aim to achieve.
Many of your students know the IMF; you know the problems we are faced with. If you take the question of a mandate, how much it should be integrated to deal with the new problems of our economies such as a looming climate crisis, or deepening inequalities, I strongly believe we ought to deal with these problems. And also how we get the voice of less represented members to be amplified, how we make sure that the big countries don't overwhelm with their problems, with their interests, the work of the institution.
I am incredibly fortunate to have staff that is relentless in the pursuit of doing what is right. I think because of that the Fund has been an evolving institution and it will continue to evolve.
PROFESSOR JOYCE: Can I pick up on something you were just saying about the Fund moving forward and looking at issues? Is it true that in the last decade, the IMF has made incredible progress in terms of talking about inequality, gender, climate change? I wonder if you could tell us what institutional strength does the IMF itself have in terms of talking, discussing, analyzing those issues?
MS. GEORGIEVA: Where the IMF excels is in holding a hand on the pulse of the economy at the national level, regionally, globally. And it means is that our staff has a unique perspective of how policies and institutions evolve and to what extent they are a match for the challenges that people, businesses, and countries face.
We are best known for financing at the time of crisis, and this is also strength. We have been more effective in acting when the crisis already hit, and we want to become a force for good preempting crisis from happening.
And we also have uniquely qualified capacity development programs that do zero‑in on the areas of our expertise: like, fiscal matters; like, facts collection systems; like, spending priorities. You take these assets of the institution and then you gear them up to climate or inequality. What does it mean? I will give you, as an example, climate, I will tell you honestly where we are strong and where we have to do better.
On climate, the Fund has come up forcefully with analytics on what are the risks for economies and what are the policies and investment to address these risks. We now have a very clear conceptual framework on how we should approach climate and it is based on three pillars:
One, send the right signal for decarbonizations, for moving to the low carbon economy through a carbon price, and the Fund is excellent in working on issues like this.
Second, define what is the public push for the shift to the new climate economy in terms of infrastructure skills.
And, third, don't forget those that are negatively impacted, in other words, promote a just transition.
This is a very clear framework on the basis of which we engage with countries, and already the Fund is integrating climate in surveyors. In this keeping ahead of the pulse of the economy, we are looking into policy advice on a scale, in other words, not just priority here or there but integrating it in our engagements.
We are thinking of ways in which we can help craft fiscal space for countries to make this transition to the new climate economy. Where we are short, we are now building up our own skills and capabilities. We are rapidly hiring climate economists and training our own teams.
Very recently, we did a big recruit for that purposes, and we are building a program for skill upgrade of everybody that works at the Fund. What helps is that quite uniquely the head of the IMF, me, happens to be an environmental economist by training.
I wrote my PhD on environmental policy in the United States in the '80s, and it was about using economic incentives for environmental change. So I can say, I mean, and when we talk about inequalities, it is exactly the same approach. We look at inequalities as a factor for economy, for growth, and for well‑being.
It is very clear that inequalities hurt prosperity and growth. And, therefore, how we integrate this into the policy advice we give to countries, how we then uniformly shift attention more to, obviously, ethical and moral problem, but also an economic problem because inequalities they reduce productivity, they impact negatively growth.
We have got skills, and we have very clear assessment as to what more we have to do so we can embrace these issues as micro‑critical (phonetic) part of the mandate of the Fund.
And you wouldn't be surprised, Joe, that part of our struggle is to convince our membership to convince our shareholders that it is micro‑critical and the Fund cannot shy away from these issues. Proud to say we are making very good progress in this direction of opening up the horizon of how we think about economic growth and prosperity.
PROFESSOR JOYCE: Kristalina, you mentioned a little bit your own previous work. And as I said in my introduction, you grew up in Bulgaria, and you were there when the communist regime ended. And we're curious to know, how does that affect your perspective when you look at issues such as the ones we're talking about today?
MS. GEORGIEVA: The most important value of this personal experience for my job at the Fund is that I know firsthand the price people pay for bad policies and the benefits of good policies. My country basically went bankrupt as a result of bad management of our economy.
We, then, got into an incredibly difficult couple of years in the early '90s, after the collapse of the centrally planned economy. In these days, I had to get up at 4 o'clock in the morning to buy milk for my daughter; and I saw how my mother's lifelong saving melted to nothing because of hyperinflation; and then the country took onboard prudent policies.
Up to this day, Bulgaria is immune against borrowing willy‑nilly and squandering money into white elephant type of projects. During this crisis, we see Bulgaria being one of the countries that have handled the economic impact of the pandemic fairly well because of strong buffers and strong finances.
I bring this experience to the Fund. And it is both an understanding that is a pathway to sound micro‑economic framework, but also having the empathy for people that are for very often no fault of their own, experiencing the negative consequences of bad policies and how this transition to sound micro‑finances can be managed with attention to social needs.
You don't pull the plug on your education and health expenditures, you guarantee that as a result of adjustment when this adjustment is necessary, the country is getting better off. But the most vulnerable, the poorest people are not left out, they actually are a center of attention.
We are now living through a very unique crisis. And to go back to your first question on the value of these institutions, if we needed to be vindicated for being part of the global landscape, this crisis gave us the ample opportunity for that.
The Fund assessed the crisis very quickly and came up with unorthodox policy advice. We basically said, spend, keep the receipts. You don't hear an IMF managing director saying this word, "spend," often.
We did that because it was the right thing to do. Now we are talking about calibration of support at this stage of the crisis; and then we stepped up very, very rapidly crisis finance directed to, especially, the most vulnerable countries.
We have funded some $105 billion, since the beginning of the pandemic, benefitting 83 countries; 49 of these 83 countries are low‑income countries. And this is where we made the biggest difference by significantly increasing our concessional lending capacity to provide lifelines where they are most needed.
I can say it was my upbringing, but even more so, having served as a crisis commissioner, and learning what it is to anticipate a shock and when the shock comes to act decisively.
PROFESSOR JOYCE: Speaking of that, not only does the IMF and you talk about the crisis to do what we need to do now, and which you have just outlined, but I know you have also talked about the world after the crisis and how things will change. You said that the crisis has triggered profound structural transformations of national economies. And you said that governments must be ready to aid in the transformation of those economies.
I wonder if you can tell us which sectors of the economies may prosper, which economies may not, and may contract, and what type of policies do you see governments with the backing of the Fund enacting?
MS. GEORGIEVA: Thank you for this question. What is very clear, just a year into this pandemic‑induced crisis, is that digital, broadly‑speaking, tech are the big winners of the crisis. You and I have no problem to do our jobs and we are part of this privileged segment of the economy that can operate remotely and even more efficiently do so.
I am actually talking about digital commerce, digital services overall, digital currencies, they are all taking off very rapidly. I used to say the future is digital. Well, the future has arrived, we are in it. Automation and manufacturing that is based on our automation, big winner.
Some parts of the food, production food services are winning for a variety of reasons. When you have local (audio skip) but you haven't built enough on them, this crisis is accelerating, moving forward, who, where are the losers?
Contact dependent industries, we saw what has happened to restaurants and services of all kinds, travel, there are some who say the conventional tourism is dead. I wouldn't go that far. I think it is going to eventually recover to certain degree, but we sure are not going to go back to where we were in the pre‑pandemic world.
Low‑skilled workers, women, young people, these are the segments in societies, country after country, that are most severely impacted. And, broadly, if I talk not about the sector but about an issue, the issue that is going already is hitting us and would hit us even more, deepening inequalities because of this K‑shape (phonetic) that we see in countries and across countries.
I am particularly concerned about the K-shape across countries after decades of progress in convergence between high‑income and low‑income countries. We are hitting the reverse gear. We are seeing now divergence that if left unattended would not only harm tremendously those affected, the countries that are affected, but it would harm security and stability in the world as a whole.
There is hugely important priority on recognizing this divergence: some doing very well; some doing very poorly; rapidly and substantially revamping our tax policies; moving towards more re‑distributional system of taxation, so those that doing very well help the rest; reshaping public spending policies so we think more about building resilience, not just to pandemic, to the pandemic, but resilience to shocks.
And what it means is investing in resilient people that are educated, healthy, with sound social protection when necessary; resilient plant, we have now a climate crisis that was knocking on the door before that has gone nowhere that we have to deal with; and continue to build the resilience of our financial system.
As you know, Joe, we did some of it, and actually, quite a lot of it. After the global financial crisis, we built more resilient banking system, but that is not enough. We have no banking institutions that have been left off the hook. We had this holistic view of resilience for a world that is going to be more shock prone, because it is a faster changing world.
PROFESSOR JOYCE: I'd like to follow up from your thoughts about that with a very specific Wellesley question. When we think about the labor skills, and of all of the changes coming to the labor force, do you have any advice about what implications that has for the education, or for a liberal arts college, such as Wellesley?
MS. GEORGIEVA: The obvious one is a more prudent and resilient educational system from early childhood development until the end of our lives, and this lifelong learning is now so clearly paramount.
What it means is that there has to be more investment in learning to learn; that I know actually liberal art colleges tend to be quite good at that. They create an environment for more fertile engagement.
I would think that we all have to be more mindful to the adaptability of skills to what the labor market shapes to be, in other words, bring more the entrepreneurs, those who hire people into constant evolution and improvement of how learning takes place.
I think we will see a greater need for vocational training that is helping. In other words, you have the colleges, but you also have ways in which people that may not go into higher education would need to have specialized skills.
One thing that I keep telling everybody, and it's not happening quite yet, is employers have a much bigger responsibility, not to train people for themselves, but to make sure that there is fertile skill enhancement environment to which they contribute as well.
PROFESSOR JOYCE: Thank you, Kristalina, so much. It's time to make a transition to getting questions from the audience. And we're going to have two Albright fellows. While they're asking their question, let me remind everybody that they can also submit questions via the chat function.
QUESTION: Thank you for coming to s peak with us. What metrics have been set in place to assess whether or not the IMF's response to the pandemic has been effective?
MS. GEORGIEVA: Thank you for asking this question. What we look at is, is our analysis accurate? And is the policy advice we built on the basis of this analysis accurate? Second, we looked at: have we adjusted the way we do our most important function, which is our surveillance function? And one thing we did at the outset of the crisis was to stop bilateral surveillance.
Why? Because everybody was in a shock, travel stopped, institutions were adjusting to work online, and there was the overwhelming priority to just simply protect the economies from collapsing. People were not looking to IMF teams in their traditional surveillance function to ask our traditional questions.
We substituted this with what we call "Policy Action Tracker", with global surveyors surveying countries, the 94 countries, for what measures they are taking to respond to the crisis.
It has been an incredibly important transmission line of experience from one country to another; 194 countries are covered by this Policy Action Tracker. And what we are looking into is: Are the policies appropriate for the crisis in the specificity of each and every country? And this is where we concentrated attention.
Third, financial assistance, and there we are asking two questions: 1) are we providing assistance where it is most needed; and 2) does it goes to those who ae most in need?
In other words, are doctors and nurses being paid? Are clinics functioning? Is the most impacted part of the economy and the most vulnerable people being served by the additional financing coming from the Fund? And to answer this question, with most countries, we have reached an agreement that they would have a post‑pandemic audit. They would audit how they have used these funds, so it is transparent.
Now, we are still only in part 1 of the crisis; 2021 is going to be the year of recovery and we have to continue to adjust the appropriateness of our policy advice and the appropriateness of our financing as we move into this second half.
I tell my staff ‑‑ maybe it's a good analogy to share with you ‑‑ I am telling them, it is like a soccer game. The year of 2020 was the first half of the game and we did well. We can say, if we look back, other side assessing, as they say, the team IMF did well.
But a game is never one just in one half. And we are now stepping into the second half. I'm telling you is going to be even more complicated, more difficult. How we are doing the second half is where I would be seeking our team, team IMF, to do really, really well.
QUESTION: Thank you. As someone who is interested in environmental economics, it's wonderful to hear it from you. My question is: Is it possible to meaningfully address climate change without significantly altering the way the global economy currently functions?
MS. GEORGIEVA: No, we need very substantial transformation if we are to win the battle against this crisis. And it is the most significant transition we have to undertake; do it everywhere, and do it walking on two legs, reducing emissions dramatically, and adapting to a changing climate because it is already happening.
What it means is that we have to get the policy framework in shape to support this transition. We have institutions that are capable of providing the foundation for these policies to take place. We need to change behavior, change incentives for producers and for consumers, and do that fairly quickly. I do believe that it is possible for market‑based solutions. But we know that markets are not perfect, so how we build the combination between incentives for market‑based solutions but also regulatory framework that doesn't undercut this first part, but addresses the imperfections, the weaknesses of market.
We have to think of the inequality implications, both of climate shocks and of the transition and the transition to the new climate economy. It is a huge, huge agenda and 2021, in my humble opinion, is a key year for this transformation. Why?
First, the pandemic actually made us all a bit more humble. I hear it from many people reevaluating what really matters in life, well, our health matters. Guess what? If you allow climate change to continue the way it is, there will be more diseases.
With rising temperatures, we would see more pandemics. And some of the problems related to a high level of carbon emissions, they come together with air pollution and tremendous health impact. If we care about health, we have to care about environment action.
Second, it is an opportune time. I cannot think of a better time. We have to come out of the pandemic, create jobs and inject more growth, but we can do that by shifting gear towards climate resilience and low carbon investments and create the jobs that are now disappearing with contact dependent sectors shrinking so massively.
Reforestations, man‑growth restoration, land degradation, building through innovation, all of these are job‑generating activities and they are great for this transition. That is the second argument I would put. We must come out of the pandemic, recover from this crisis. We can do it by reducing the risk of the climate crisis. Third, right now, the world seems to be ‑‑ it's kind of a fortunate moment ‑‑ we have new Administration in the U.S.; yesterday, President Biden took over. What was the first thing he did? Well, not the first, it was, I think, the third thing he did. His third signature was on rejoining the Paris Agreement.
We have two countries, UK and Italy, leading G-20 and G-7, both very much pro‑climate. We had in the end of the year, in November, the COP26. Who is hosting COP26? Those same two pro‑climate action countries. I would expect that Bris Johnson, the UK government and UK people would really want to make this a success. Why? They just left the European Union. They want to stand tall and be counted. This is their opportunity to make a difference. You know how sometimes stars align ‑‑ two (phonetic) politically stars have aligned. All that is required from us, to go back to your question, is to take the wheel and turn the car, take on a new road.
PROFESSOR JOYCE: We have some questions from our audience, and so I'd like to pose some of those. The first question is one I suspect you have heard before, which is that the IMF sometimes suffers from a legitimacy gap, in the sense that it does have an impact on national economies, but it lacks democratic representation in terms of how countries are represented at the Fund. I'm curious to know your reaction to that and how the Fund could address that type of issue?
MS. GEORGIEVA: I mentioned it in the beginning that in the buckets of issues that we have to strive to change is our governance and representation of members at the IMF. There has been progress, you know, credit should be given where credit is due.
Over the years, we have increased the share of emerging markets. The BRICS countries, these countries are now in the top 10 of the shareholders at the IMF. We have moved the percentage from advanced economies to emerging market economies.
But this is not quite where we should be. We still have the shareholding at the IMF not mirroring the structure of the world economy. Even if we were to mirror it, we have a group of low‑income countries that are underrepresented.
When I was at the World Bank ‑‑ and Joe mentioned that ‑‑ as Corporate Secretary, I was responsible for what we called "Vice Reform," at the World Bank. And I am proud to say one thing they did at the Bank, or we did, while I was there, was to give one more chair to Africa. Africa at the Fund has only two chairs out of 24, at our Board of Directors; at the Bank, Africa has three chairs; so a little bit better representation of the African continent.
I believe very strongly that this strive to improve the representation is a continuum; there is no moment in which we can say we are done because the world would continue to change. We have our periodic reviews of our quotas. This is basically the shareholding at the Fund; it is the 16th of those reviews that is forthcoming.
When I was elected, one of the things I was very clear in saying is that: to have more legitimacy, we have to be more representative; to be more representative, this review has to deliver shift in the ownership and representation at the Fund.
You ask your question in a context of the 15th review that didn't deliver quite on the expectations the members have; the 16th, next time around, we cannot possibly allow ourselves to miss. And there is, of course, the issue of selection of the leadership of the Fund.
There is a tradition that has been now slightly bended in the right direction. Because, yes, I am a European, but I come from an emerging market economy. And when I was elected, emerging markets cheered, the emerging market countries said, "Finally, somebody who knows who we are from the inside." But, obviously, there have to be more advances also in the way leadership selection takes place.
By the way, Joe, one thing that you might or might know is that at least we have improved dramatically representation of women. Because now, not only in the Fund, we have increased women in senior positions, we now have our directors ‑‑ from 25 percent, we are now 40‑plus percent; and, of course, we have a way to go to 50.
For a first time in the 76 years' history, the key person representing the membership, leading the membership is a woman. The new chair of the IMFC, the International Monetary and Finance Committee, is Minister Magdelena Andersson of Sweden. You would have this moment when two women are going to be at the helm of the management and the shareholders at the Fund.
PROFESSOR JOYCE: I wonder if I could add that, in addition, the now Chief Economist at the IMF is indeed Gita Gopinath. And I can assure you our profession was delighted to see a woman put into that job, which, as you will say, is a very important one.
MS. GEORGIEVA: And she is absolutely fantastic, Gita rocks.
PROFESSOR JOYCE: No argument there. I think for our last questions, I am going to put two or three together. Questions come up periodically about the need for new Bretton Woods system.
Maybe I should say, very quickly, Bretton Woods is the name we use to refer to the agreement that was made in 1944 at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, not too far from Wellesley, by the 44 representatives of the allied countries looking forward to the post‑war world. And they set up a new monetary system and also started the IMF, as well as the World Bank. That's what Bretton Woods started with.
The question sometimes comes, is there a need for a new Bretton Woods? And, as part of that, how can the Fund persuade countries?
You have alluded to this before, but let's come back ‑‑ to do what needs to be done, to do the changes which you are very eloquently putting out need to be done, how much can the Fund induce countries to make those changes?
MS. GEORGIEVA: I went to Bretton Woods for my birthday, this last summer, because I felt I wanted to get into this history of how in the midst of a war our founding fathers ‑‑ they, by the way, were all fathers, 44 men ‑‑ had the wisdom to establish institutions for post‑war reconstruction?
Now, we are in a similar kind of Bretton Woods moment. We have to reconstruct; we have to rebuild from the hit of COVID‑19; and, at the same time, we have to transform our economies to be greener, to be fairer, actually, to be digital everywhere, so everybody has access to this digital transformation. We do have a new Bretton Woods moment in that sense.
Does it mean we have to create new institutions? I, actually ‑‑ not because I am in one of them, this is not self‑preservation ‑‑ I see these institutions having evolved with time doing what needs to be done today to protect the world economy from significant harm.
If we didn't exist, if we didn't have the World Bank, the IMF, and other institutions, we'd have to be honest. The world would have been in recession that would have gotten deeper into depression.
We would have had yet another Great Depression and these are not my words. A Japanese historian talked to me about that and said, you realize that this is what will happen. Why? Because we would have lacked these transmission lines of policy assessment, policy action swiftly (phonetic). You realize that the world has forked (phonetic) $20 trillion to put the floor under the world economy and monetary policy accommodation has allowed businesses to survive. Unemployment has gone up, but not to dramatic levels.
I would argue that that element of resilience for the world economy that comes with these institutions is precious. We have to value it, and we have to continue to develop, not only the Bretton Woods institutions, but also the other elements that keep the world connected and effectively coordinates action when it is necessary.
The World Health Organization, just to name another one that was part of yesterday's revival. If you look at the IMF today, we have performed the heart of the global financial safety net function very different than we did it in 44. But we do perform this function. I would be preoccupied and insistent on continuing to build these institutions for tomorrow. And this is probably the thing, the question that gives me most sleepless nights.
The question is: How in a rapidly changing world that is two (phonetic) politically very different, more fragmented, but used to be, how can we keep our membership together? How we can crystalize objectives that generate unity and also action on a scale that is necessary?
So far, the Fund has raised to the occasion, even if we would be a bit kind of meandering, losing direction. Especially, at the moment of shock, the Fund always would step up and then change so it can remain effective. Also, what I see is a tremendously important need for cooperation among the multiple institutions that is one driven by purposes.
If we are to say that the world today has three priorities: bring the health crisis to an end everywhere; transform, recover and transform the economy for the future, not replicate the economy of yesterday; and prevent divergence between rich and poor, rich and poor people, rich and poor countries.
Every institution has to find its place vis-à-vis these priorities and deliver its utmost best to address them, and for me that is our new Bretton Woods moment to step up to what is expected from us in this crisis.
PROFESSOR JOYCE: I think that's a wonderful place to end our conversation with you. Kristalina, as you know, the Albright Institute is designed to take young women at Wellesley College and expose them to global issues.
And for that reason, we ask global leaders such as you to come and address them. And your presentation today was certainly something that will stay with them, that they will remember, and that they will act on, more importantly, in the future, as they, in turn, leave Wellesley and rise to positions of leadership.
Kristalina, thank you so very, very much, for joining Wellesley College today.
MS. GEORGIEVA: Thank you, Joe, it was wonderful to be with you. And to everybody who was on the line, stay well and never, never, never aspire for less than the best you can be.
PROFESSOR JOYCE: I'm sure Madam Albright would second that one very quickly.
MS. GEORGIEVA: Thank you.
