FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: Jeff Hauser, [email protected]
In response to the Biden administration nominating private equity executive Ajay Banga for president of the World Bank, Revolving Door Project Executive Director Jeff Hauser issued the following statement:
“Earlier this month, US Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen admirably claimed that she sought a ‘transparent, merit-based’ process to find the US’ nominee for the next World Bank president. Such a process, genuinely engaged in, would have surely yielded a figure with a strong record of accomplishment in public service. Instead, President Joe Biden and Secretary Yellen have literally named the Vice Chairman of a rapacious international private equity firm (General Atlantic) to take his first job ever in public service at nearly the highest level in the world possible. Nothing in Banga’s resume inspires confidence that he will turn the World Bank away from a path of neocolonialism and predation by Global North corporations upon Global South countries.”
“Yellen pledged that the Administration’s nominee would ‘build on the Bank’s longstanding work to fight extreme poverty, [and] promote shared prosperity.’ But neither private equity, nor Mastercard, nor Citigroup, nor PepsiCo, nor Nestlé, nor Dow promote shared prosperity. They all do vastly more to exacerbate inequality than to fight it. The world has billions of people, many thousands of whom are highly accomplished figures committed to the public interest. The Biden administration initially appeared to understand this. Sadly, a vision that those who govern best are those that have profited the most from deregulation, economic predation, and the shrinking of the public sphere seems to be winning out in the Biden Administration now. Indeed, this vision, we have argued, is what guides Biden’s new Chief of Staff, Jeffrey Zients.”
“Biden and Yellen should be ashamed of this choice. Our message in the past was to figure out how to expeditiously fire David Malpass. Our message now is to retract this nomination and simply do better.”
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PHOTO CREDIT: “A Conversation with Piyush Goyal and Ajay Banga” by World Economic Forum is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.