Washington DC - The Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund, Christine Lagarde, announced that she is resigning. Lagarde is pursuing her nomination to lead the European Central Bank. Her resignation takes effect on September 12th.

"Lagarde moved forward new focuses on gender and inequality at the International Monetary Fund," said Eric LeCompte, the Executive Director of the religious development group Jubilee USA. "After the Greek crisis, we saw her lead shifts in thinking on the problems with austerity, although we didn't see enough changes in austerity policies at the IMF."

Since the creation of the IMF and World Bank in 1945, the United States and Europe who hold the controlling votes of the financial institutions, had a "gentleman's agreement" that the head of the World Bank should be an American and the head of the IMF should be a European.

"Now that Lagarde is moving on, there are growing calls for the new head of the IMF to be selected based on the merits of the nominee as opposed to whether or not the person is born in Europe," stated LeCompte who serves on United Nations finance expert groups.