By Michael Soltys, Senior Editor of Buenos Aires Herald.

The main problem with President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner’s presence at this week’s G20 summit in Pittsburgh will not so much lie in being on a different wavelength since her personal priority of restoring Argentina to international capital markets broadly overlaps with the presumed summit agenda of financial regulation — the problem is rather a lack of clarity in approaching that aim. Especially schizophrenic is the approach towards the International Monetary Fund (IMF) — while Economy Minister Amado Boudou’s avowed intention is to reach agreement with the IMF, CFK made a point of meeting with the Fund’s arch-critic Joseph Stiglitz in New York over the weekend for the explicit purpose of IMF-bashing. Will she then be throwing her efforts in Pittsburgh into IMF reform or does she back the Stiglitz stance of finding a complete alternative, in which case what would be the point of any IMF agreement?

The G20 summit will also be grouping the creditors for approximately two-thirds of Argentina’s Paris Club debt so this should also be on the agenda. Around this time last year CFK actually solved this problem by abruptly announcing the repayment in full of the 6.5 billion dollars owed the Paris Club but a few days later Lehman Brothers went under, the whole financial world imploded and nothing happened. This offer will not be repeated this year — weighing the dent in reserves against the minimal image gain, Boudou prefers to stagger repayment over five years, also tying it to investment by the Paris Club member countries in Argentina (tomorrow CFK will be meeting with prospective United States investors). But how much can these countries invest outside their own struggling economies and would Argentina be their choice pick among emerging markets if they could?

Yet any Paris Club settlement is hypothetical without previous understanding with the IMF and the key question thus becomes how far the CFK administration is prepared to go to reach that understanding — is the goal a token or a genuine agreement? Then President Néstor Kirchner was willing to pay nearly 10 billion dollars to the IMF in 2006 in order to cancel its debt and hence monitoring, thus freeing his government to fiddle figures at will — is his wife’s government prepared to return to that tutelage? Above all, her administration must decide how it reconciles its exclusive focus on the real economy and scorn for capital markets (as if the two were entirely different universes) while at the same time mending fences with the IMF.