You know, when I sit in meetings and things are very tense and people take things extremely seriously and they invest a lot of their ego, I sometimes think to myself, 'Come on, you know, there's life and there's death and there is love.' And all of that ego business is nonsense compared to that.

Lagarde was the first woman ever to become finance minister of a G8 economy and is the first woman to ever head the IMF. Her appointment is the 11th consecutive appointment of a European to head the IMF. " In making general "payback" comments about peripheral eurozone countries having "had a nice time" Lagarde appeared to be unaware that for example Spain had actually been running budget surpluses for three consecutive years going into the financial crisis while Ireland had been running surpluses for five consecutive years going in as her own organisation's data shows.

On 28 June 2011 Christine Lagarde was named as the next MD of the IMF for a five-year term starting on 5 July 2011 replacing Dominique Strauss-Kahn. A noted antitrust and labor lawyer Lagarde became the first female chairman of the international law firm Baker & McKenzie.