Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s Chief of Staff Dan Katz is set to leave the Trump administration and join the International Monetary Fund as the first deputy managing director, three sources familiar with the matter told The Post,in a move that is being described as “a big win” for the president’s America First policies.
Katz, a former senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute who joined the Treasury Department in January, will become the most senior American at the IMF, working under Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva, a Bulgarian economist and ex-EU commissioner.
“He is one of the secretary’s closest confidantes,” said one insider. “It is a big win for President Trump’s America First economic agenda on the international stage.”
A Treasury spokesperson declined to comment.
The Yale graduate and Goldman Sachs alum, who also served in the first Trump administration, played a key role in thrashing out the US’s economic partnership deal with Ukraine and is seen as Bessent’s point man on China.
Katz also has personal ties with the world of global finance: Lord Mervyn King, the former governor of the Bank of England, officiated his wedding ceremony in Riverside, Connecticut, in September 2019.
Katz’s soon-to-be former boss Bessent has recently criticized the IMF for “mission creep” and accused it of promoting woke causes in a speech in downtown DC in April.
He blasted the global lender, set up after World War II, claiming it “devotes disproportionate time and resources to work on climate change, gender, and social issues.”
“Focus on these areas is crowding out its work on critical macroeconomic issues,” he said in the speech at the Institute of International Finance Forum. “The IMF has been whistling past the graveyard.”
There are already signs of some changes at the institution, which is often described as a lender of last resort because it helps bail out debt-laden economies.
Last week, sources told The Post that the Fund’s climate and gender units would no longer operate as standalone divisions inside the body, but would instead be merged into its wider macroeconomic unit.
The changes were first reported by Bloomberg News.
This global financial firefighter was at the forefront of the European debt crisis in 2008 when Eurozone economies were sent into meltdown after the collapse of Lehman Brothers.
It was created out of the Bretton Woods Conference in 1944 in the US when the US, the UK, and the former Soviet Union discussed how to shape the post-WW2 global economy.
Under a long-standing ‘gentleman’s agreement’ between the United States and its European allies, a US citizen is always nominated to run the IMF’s sister organization, the World Bank.
In turn, the US always supports the candidacy of a European to take the reins of the Fund.
Ironically, officials at the global lender also enjoy lavish perks virtually unheard of in the private sector and many people in the countries that take its loans can only dream of.
The Post revealed in December how its staffers can gain cut-rate access to an upmarket Maryland golf and country club that costs regular Joes at least $20,000 to join.
The IMF’s top directors can rake in around $437,000 annually, compared with $52,000 for junior staffers, according to the latest publicly available salary information.
They can also pick up eye-popping retirement benefits, including “a generous final salary” pension and comprehensive worldwide health insurance, the IMF’s recruitment page states.
