Austrian Finance Minister Magnus Brunner traveled to Washington, DC this past week (April 21-24) to participate in the 2022 Spring Meeting of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank Group and to hold a series of meetings with his American counterparts.

A meeting with Federal Reserve Board Chairman Jerome Powell on Thursday, April 21 kicked off Minister’s Washington visit. The primary subject of the meeting was a discussion of how to manage rising global inflation—6.5% in Austria in March, according to Statistik Austria, and 8.5% in the U.S. On Friday, Minister Brunner met with Andrea Gacki, the Director of Foreign Assets Control at the U.S. Department of the Treasury, to discuss sanctions on Russia and Iran.

On Saturday, April 23, the Minister also met with Axel van Trostsenburg, the Managing Director of Operations at the World Bank and Anna Bjerde, the World Bank’s Vice President. Minister Brunner’s trip was capped off later that day with a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) signing ceremony, celebrating the renewal of IMF cooperation on the Joint Vienna Institute with IMF Managing Director Kristina Georgieva. The Joint Vienna Institute (JVI) is an independent international institution that offers a wide range of economic policy-oriented courses to public officials and experts from Central, Eastern and Southeastern Europe, as well as the Caucasus and Central Asia. Since it was founded in 1992, the MOU between the IMF and Austria has been reviewed and renewed every four years—the last time in 2018—and has trained over 50,000 officials from ministries of finance and central banks in applied economic policy.