Could the emerging powers set up their own IMF?

In today’s Washington Post, Sebastian Mallaby pleads for an IMF chief other than France’s Christine Lagarde. He’s worried that the institution’s credibility will suffer with her at the helm and he has  a stark warning for an Obama administration that he sees acquiescing to continued European leadership:

[T]he IMF cannot maintain its legitimacy unless it allows candidates from the world’s most dynamic economies a fair shot at the top job. It may be old news that, especially since the financial crisis, most of the world’s growth has come from emerging economies; but it is less well appreciated that this is likely to continue for some time. On the deep drivers of growth — demographics, debt burdens, literacy, longevity, and even measures of political and economic freedom — the emerging economies either have formidable advantages over the mature ones or have narrowed the gap dramatically. If they are not allowed to lead existing global institutions, they will eventually set up their own. An American president eager to sustain the post-World War II system that reflects U.S. values and interests surely must not want that. 

This is a very ambitious and, to my mind, highly implausible claim. Since the the round of institution-building at the close of the Second World War, various discontented countries have periodically muttered about establishing their own parallel institutions. The Soviets and the Chinese talked about  an alternative to the United Nations when they felt that the West was dominating that institution. After the tide turned at the UN in the 1960s, politicians in the United States began talking about an international League of Democracies to supplant the UN.  And during the Asian financial crisis of the 1990s, Japan mooted the idea of an Asian monetary fund.

For the most part, these ideas have remained just that. The group of post-WWII institutions have had enormous staying power. They’ve insinuated themselves into the landscape in a way that is not easy to undo. Building new institutions–particularly in opposition to established ones–is a daunting task.  The disunity that the emerging powers have demonstrated during the ongoing IMF leadership race suggests that they lack the energy and cohesiveness to manage that task.

What’s more, there are powerful financial reasons that emerging countries will want to remain part of the IMF and the World Bank. They may again need their resources, and a large portion of those resources come from the West, and will for the foreseeable future. There may be good reasons for opposing Lagarde’s coronation, but the specter of a rival IMF headed by the emerging powers is not one of them.

More:  At least one reader is not convinced that a rival IMF is so unlikely:

Is it that farfetched that China could use a chunk of their $1.5 trillion in foreign exchange reserves….to set up a "Global Monetary Alliance", get Russian buy-in for, say, $50B, and then start recruiting bandwagoners? Saudi, France, Turkey, Brazil, South Africa? A counter-IMF wouldn’t destroy or replace the IMF, but it would compete with it.