LONDON -- A top Harvard economist called Friday for a radical overhaul of the International Monetary Fund, saying it was wedded to 1950s-style economics and was failing to help debtor nations such as Russia. On the 50th anniversary of the historic Bretton Woods conference which shaped the post-World War II monetary order, Professor Jeffrey Sachs said the IMF should protect "distressed" nations from creditors and provide emergency loans much faster. He said U.S. Chapter 11 legislation, which provides troubled companies with protection from baying creditors, should be a starting point for a new IMF strategy and proposed an international conference to thrash out ideas. "The IMF has become set in ways that represent strategies for the 1950s and which are totally inappropriate for global finance in the 1990s," Sachs told a symposium at the London School of Economics to mark Friday's anniversary.