The World's Banker: A Story of Failed States, Financial Crises, and the Wealth a

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Mallaby pens this penetrating portrait of James Wolfensohn, the smooth global deal maker and power broker who has furiously worked his many connections to become the World Bank's president.

FORMATPaperback LANGUAGEEnglish CONDITIONBrand New Publisher Description

Never has the World Bank's relief work been more important than in the last nine years, when crises as huge as AIDS and the emergence of terrorist sanctuaries have threatened the prosperity of billions. This journalistic masterpiece by Washington Post columnist Sebastian Mallaby charts those controversial years at the Bank under the leadership of James Wolfensohn—the unstoppable power broker whose daring efforts to enlarge the planet's wealth in an age of globalization and terror were matched only by the force of his polarizing personality. Based on unprecedented access to its subject, this captivating tour through the messy reality of global development is that rare triumph—an emblematic story through which a gifted author has channeled the spirit of the age.This edition features a new afterword by the author that analyzes the appointment of Paul Wolfowitz as Wolfensohn's successor at the World bank

Author Biography

Sebastian Mallaby is the author of several books, including The Power Law, More Money Than God, The Man Who Knew, and The World's Banker. A former Financial Times contributing editor and two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, Mallaby is the Paul A. Volcker Senior Fellow for International Economics at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Table of Contents

Preface: The Prisoner of LilliputChapter One: A Tale of Two AmbitionsChapter Two: "World Bank Murderer"Chapter Three: The Renaissance PresidentChapter Four: A Twister in AfricaChapter Five: Mission SarajevoChapter Six: Narcissus and the OctopusChapter Seven: The Cancer of CorruptionChapter Eight: Uganda's Myth and MiracleChapter Nine: A Framework for DevelopmentChapter Ten: From Seattle to TibetChapter Eleven: Waking Up to TerrorChapter Twelve: A Plague upon DevelopmentChapter Thirteen: Back to the FutureChapter Fourteen: A Lion at CarnegieAcknowledgmentsNotesIndex

Review

"A sophisticated, evenhanded take on the [World Bank's] last decade of development efforts... Illuminating... heartbreaking... a fascinating narrative." —The New York Times"An excellent read... [Mallaby] has a talent for brilliant writing and penetrating analysis." —Financial Times

Long Description

Never has the World Banks relief work been more important than in the last nine years, when crises as huge as AIDS and the emergence of terrorist sanctuaries have threatened the prosperity of billions. This journalistic masterpiece by "Washington Post" columnist Sebastian Mallaby charts those controversial years at the Bank under the leadership of James Wolfensohnthe unstoppable power broker whose daring efforts to enlarge the planets wealth in an age of globalization and terror were matched only by the force of his polarizing personality. Based on unprecedented access to its subject, this captivating tour through the messy reality of global development is that rare triumphan emblematic story through which a gifted author has channeled the spirit of the age.

Review Quote

A sophisticated, evenhanded take on the [World Banks] last decade of development efforts... Illuminating... heartbreaking... a fascinating narrative. ("The New York Times") An excellent read... [Mallaby] has a talent for brilliant writing and penetrating analysis. ("Financial Times")

Excerpt from Book

Chapter One A TALE OF TWO AMBITIONS On Friday, September 14, 2001, President George W. Bush led a televised prayer service in Washington''s National Cathedral. He invoked the heroes of three days before: inside the World Trade Center, a man who could have saved himself had stayed and died beside his quadriplegic friend; a priest died giving the last rites to a firefighter; two office workers, finding a disabled stranger, carried her down sixty-eight floors to safety. We feel, said the president, what Franklin Roosevelt called the "warm courage of national unity." And he spelled out the next steps. "Our responsibility to history is already clear: to answer these attacks and rid the world of evil." Meanwhile another memorial service was under way in another part of Washington. In what passes for the capital''s business district, two blocks west of the White House, two thousand people gathered in the glass-fronted atrium of the World Bank''s headquarters. In an institution with employees from more than a hundred countries, including a large number of Muslims, the attacks of September 11 had induced a trauma of a special kind. Along with the fear felt by everyone in Washington-that more and nastier attacks might follow soon-there was the fear that life in the United States would become less secure for people with Pakistani or Saudi or Afghan passports. And there was the fear-which only grew as the president''s rhetoric evolved-that friends and family abroad could somehow find themselves on the wrong side of a new global divide-the side that President Bush now classified as "evil." The World Bankers gathered in the atrium, where the walls rise, cathedral-like, thirteen stories above the marble floor to a roof composed of glass; and where, in place of the baptismal basin and Christian inscription, there is an internal lake fed by an internal waterfall, and a sign proclaiming, OUR DREAM IS A WORLD FREE OF POVERTY. The staff packed into this atrium, displacing the kiosk displays on work stress and business communication that often furnish its vast space, and watched their president face them from a stage: a silver-haired, barrel-chested, twinkly eyed man-a sort of Santa Claus without the beard and costume. "I am not a preacher and I surely don''t represent all the religions here," the president began, "but in this room we have a microcosm of the world. We have one hundred forty nations. We have Christians and Muslims and Jews and Buddhists and Sikhs.... We as a family can be a light for each other and for our community and for the world, because we are charged with the most significant challenge of all: to relieve poverty, and to improve the lives of our fellow men, and give our children a chance for peace and hope.... Ours is a noble task," he added. To relieve poverty and so create a space for peace: Over the next few weeks James Wolfensohn, who is more of a preacher than he allows, built upon this theme, offering a response to 9/11 that contrasted markedly with President Bush''s promise to "rid the world of evil." In Wolfensohn''s view, an understanding of the terrorist attacks began with the big picture: In a world of 6 billion people, half lived on less than $2 per day, and a fifth subsisted with not even a dollar. In the next twenty-five years, moreover, the world''s population would swell by a further 2 billion, and all but 50 million of these would live in poverty-afflicted countries. Even if no simple link existed between poverty and terrorism, these population numbers surely meant something. In a world with so much poverty, you couldn''t just identify a few pockets of terrorism and vow to root them out. Security lay in bringing the excluded in, not in dividing the world into two camps and rooting out the evil one. In the past, Wolfensohn would say, you might have overlooked this link between security and poverty. For the fortunate fifth of the world''s people, who lived in the countries with four-fifths of the world''s income, it had been possible to imagine that a wall separated "them" from "us," that sheer distance-psychic, geographical, or otherwise-could insulate us from the billion people who lacked drinkable water, or the women who perished in childbirth at the rate of one a minute. But after September 11, it was time to realize that global poverty had global reach, whether because it created the failed states that nurtured terrorists, or because it incubated disease, environmental damage, and migration pressures. "There is no wall," Wolfensohn declared. "We are linked by trade, investment, finance, by travel and communications, by disease, by crime, by migration, by environmental degradation, by drugs, by financial crises and by terror." If the rich world was going to get serious about fighting global poverty, there was no doubt that the World Bank would lead the effort. It was a presence in almost every poor country in the world, supplying around $20 billion in loans a year, for projects ranging from irrigation systems to anticorruption efforts, from AIDS control to a victorious campaign against river blindness in Africa. The Bank''s money, moreover, was just part of its significance; more than any other institution in the world, it understood the complex web of influences that keep people poor, and it set the intellectual agenda for other development agencies. Its ten-thousand-strong staff combined raw brain power with practical experience of four continents. It advised developing countries on which problems they should tackle and how they should proceed, spreading the lessons from these efforts around the world, so that Madagascar might learn from Thailand or Tunisia. Every time the rich world''s leaders confronted global problems-whether it was AIDS or female illiteracy or environmental pressures-they turned instinctively to the World Bank. Now, in the wake of 9/11, they were bound to do so once again, and with a new sense of urgency. Reacting to the new challenge of terror, President Bush had invoked Franklin Roosevelt. In setting forth his own reaction, Wolfensohn was invoking Roosevelt as well, even though he never mentioned him. The World Bank was conceived six decades before the terrorist attacks, in the teeth of another violent threat to American security. In December 1941, scarcely a week after the Japanese assault on Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt''s long-time friend and treasury secretary, Henry Morgenthau, commissioned a blueprint for the postwar economic order. Morgenthau was incapable of designing such a thing himself-he was a gentleman-farmer, not a financier-so he turned to Harry Dexter White, a driven, brilliant Harvard PhD whose service was later rewarded with persecution at the hands of Senator Joseph McCarthy. White''s brief was nothing less than to prevent another war, and to do so by forestalling the kind of economic storm that had brought about the current one. As Morgenthau put it a little while later, "all of us have seen the great economic tragedy of our time. We saw the worldwide depression of the 1930s. We saw currency disorders develop and spread from land to land.... We saw unemployment and wretchedness.... We saw bewilderment and bitterness become the breeders of fascism, and, finally, of war." White''s first priority was to prevent more such "currency disorders." The postwar economic system would be anchored by the gold standard, which would shield commerce from the twin evils of exchange-rate shocks and inflation. If this system came under pressure-if a balance of payments deficit exhausted a nation''s gold reserves-a new international lender of last resort would bail the country out rather than leaving it to devalue. This new bail-out lender ultimately took shape as the International Monetary Fund, which today stands across the street from the World Bank in Washington, and which still fights financial crises from Argentina to Turkey. But White''s creativity did not stop there. He also conceived the idea of a new public bank that would promote the rebuilding of Europe, so ending the "unemployment and wretchedness" that Morgenthau lamented. At first, the new institution''s proposed name-the "Bank for Reconstruction of the United and Associated Nations"-made no reference to the plight of developing countries. But a member of White''s team suggested that this bank could play a role beyond the reconstruction of Europe. In a memo circulated in November 1943, the words "and Development" were inserted after Reconstruction in the title. Without World War II, and the extraordinary leverage that it afforded the United States, White''s plans might have faltered. His main ally abroad was John Maynard Keynes, the preeminent economist of the time, who was then advising Britain''s Treasury. Keynes agreed with the outline of the American ideas, but he disagreed on the detail. He took a dim view of White''s proposal to convene an international conference to discuss plans for a new world bank; observing that forty-four governments would come, he warned of "the most monstrous monkey-house." But White insisted on the gathering, and Keynes swallowed his distaste: he knew that Britain depended upon American support, both economic and military. In July 1944, when the Allied forces had still not broken out of their Normandy beachhead, several hundred delegates convened in the sprawling Mount Washington Hotel in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire. Even then, the creation of an international bank was by no means certain. The conference invitation proclaimed currency stabilization as the primary goal; creating a bank for reconstruction was a secondary objective. Keynes headed the commission charged with discussing the potential bank''s design; he liked the idea of a fresh source of reconstruction funds for Europe, and saw no positive harm in lending whatever might be left to Latin America or India. After a few days of

Details ISBN0143036793 Author Sebastian Mallaby Short Title WORLDS BANKER Series Council on Foreign Relations Books (Penguin Press) Language English ISBN-10 0143036793 ISBN-13 9780143036791 Media Book Format Paperback Year 2006 Residence Washington, DC, US Subtitle A Story of Failed States, Financial Crises, and the Wealth and Poverty of Nations DOI 10.1604/9780143036791 Country of Publication United States AU Release Date 2006-04-25 NZ Release Date 2006-04-25 US Release Date 2006-04-25 UK Release Date 2006-04-25 Pages 496 Publisher Penguin Putnam Inc Publication Date 2006-04-25 Imprint The Penguin Press DEWEY 332.1532092 Audience General We've got this

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