Christine Lagarde, the managing director of the International Monetary Fund, may not have realized that the headlines after her talk Monday on global economic challenges were about her casual remarks that the IMF could be based in Beijing in 10 years.

She was speaking at the Center for Global Development in Washington with its president, Masood Ahmed, a former senior IMF official.

Talking about the growing weight and contribution in the global economy by emerging market economies, Lagarde pointed out that those economies are currently underrepresented at the IMF and should be better represented if current growth trends continue.

“Which might very well mean, that if we have this conversation in 10 years’ time we might not be sitting in Washington DC,” Lagarde said.

“We will do it in Beijing,” Ahmed chipped in.

“We’ll do it in our Beijing head office,” Lagarde added, smiling and eliciting laughs from the audience, with Ahmed giving a thumbs-up.

“That’s a possibility. And it’s actually called for in the articles of the IMF that the head office has to be in the largest economy in the institution,” Lagarde said.

The IMF chief quickly added that talking about Beijing in 10 years’ time, it will be critically important, in order to secure staff eagerness to travel, that climate change commitments made by China be met.

The New York Times and Reuters have run stories highlighting Lagarde’s comments about the IMF possibly moving its head office to Beijing a decade later. The news also has been picked up by media in China.

“My understanding from people at the meeting is that the comment was made in jest. But of course, there is a grain of truth in every joke,” Caroline Freund, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, told China Daily on Tuesday.

Freund, an economist who had previously worked at the IMF, the World Bank and the US Federal Reserve, said that even if the IMF is not located in China, China will…

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