It’s all but official. Paul Wolfowitz, the neocon who helped give us the Iraq War only to be sidelined to the World Bank where he ended his presidency mired in a corruption scandal that led to his forced resignation, will officially step down on June 30. The next day, on July 1, he will be replaced by Robert Zoellick, another neocon who advocated invading Iraq in the 1990s. This is a man who ran amok in his role as U.S. Trade Representative.
Foreign Policy In Focus asked the Microcredit Summit Campaign’s Sam Daley-Harris to respond to the question of whether microcredit is the solution to global poverty or whether its benefits have been oversold. Robert Pollin, who also provided this FPIF analysis of microcredit’s plusses and minuses, responds to Daley-Harris below. Finally, Felicia Montgomery also of the Microcredit Summit Campaign responds to Pollin.
Making credit accessible to poor people is a laudable aim. But as a tool for fighting global poverty, microcredit should be judged by its effectiveness, not good intentions.
The problem with the World Bank is much bigger than its president, Paul Wolfowitz.
Before Robert Zoellick is confirmed as president of the World Bank Group, his bosses on the World Bank’s board should ask him a simple question: Are you, like your predecessor Paul Wolfowitz, aiming to get rich off of eliminating poverty?
Nine days after the September 11 terrorist attacks, I opened up The Washington Post and stared right into the flinty mind of one Robert B. Zoellick, the Bush administration’s pick for new World Bank president.
The scandal over the salaries paid to World Bank president Paul Wolfowitz’s friends and lover opened the door to good questions about both the bank and its president. Wolfowitz’s resignation answered some of them, but one of the best questions of all has yet to be asked: is there a larger problem with an institution claiming to be “working for a world free of poverty” paying those salaries to anyone?
As the controversy around Iraq War architect Paul Wolfowitz’s uncertain future as president of the World Bank intensifies, the financial institution is not only losing supporters. It’s also losing victims. In Latin America, countries are paying off their World Bank loans early, cutting off ties with the Bank, and creating their own financing instruments to replace the world’s oldest multilateral lending agency.
As International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank officials engage in their joint semi-annual meetings in Washington, the Fund has a nettlesome new task: convincing its shareholders (most of the world’s governments, represented at the meeting by Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors) that the institution should continue to exist.
A British court recently ruled that Donegal International, a “vulture fund” that makes short and long-term investments for huge profits, has the right to profit from its purchase of millions of dollars worth of Zambia’s debt – acquired for a tiny fraction of its face value eight years ago. This bizarre legal and financial tangle is a clear example of global profiteering at its worst.