The World Bank Is Remaking Itself as a Creature of Wall Street

Jim Yong Kim, the World Bank’s president, is
trying to revitalize a hidebound institution.
But his embrace of Wall Street is controversial.

.. In the fall of 2016, Jim Yong Kim, the president of the World Bank, sat down with some of the most powerful figures in the global economy.

Hosted by Christine Lagarde, the head of the International Monetary Fund, their discussion focused on financial trouble spots around the globe. There was scant talk about poverty, which the World Bank has committed to eradicate.

.. The World Bank, once a powerhouse of global finance, is searching for relevance. Mr. Kim’s unusual solution: embrace Wall Street.

.. Developed-world governments that are the bank’s members provided the bulk of its money, which was used to make loans to developing nations for infrastructure projects and the like.
.. the bank’s war chest is dwarfed by the funds pouring into developing countries through financial markets. Perhaps most important, the World Bank’s biggest benefactor and largest shareholder — the United States — has become its most trenchant critic.

.. Instead of relying solely on contributions from reluctant donor governments, he is pushing private investors — sovereign wealth funds, private equity firms and insurance companies — to pony up trillions of dollars for projects in Indonesia, Zambia, India and elsewhere. His pitch: They can reap rich returns by putting their money to work alongside the World Bank.

.. Trained as an anthropologist and medical doctor, Mr. Kim now says that the world of high finance is “some of the coolest stuff I have ever looked at.”

.. The son of Korean immigrants, Mr. Kim worked in the slums of Haiti and Peru, guided by the liberation theology of Catholic priests and the outrage of leftist intellectual Noam Chomsky.

.. as a public health crusader and a vocal critic of the bank for imposing heavy-handed solutions on poor countries — made him acutely aware of the institution’s frailties.

.. provides cash to companies in exchange for equity stakes, the World Bank currently drums up more than $7 billion a year from the private sector to invest in ventures in the developing world. Mr. Kim wants that figure to increase eventually to $30 billion.
.. The World Bank promised to protect investors against some losses.
.. those benefiting from the World Bank’s lending practices were “the people who fly in on a first-class ticket to give advice to governments.”
.. The argument was that growing investment flows into developing countries rendered World Bank lending mostly superfluous.

.. Last year, the World Bank dispensed $61 billion in loans and investments. By contrast, investors now inject more than $1 trillion a year into emerging markets

.. In effect, he was pitching the bank’s services as a middleman, ready to back projects with guarantees and other incentives. No longer could the World Bank be the sole provider of loans, which, he said, are “crowding out” the private sector.

.. the World Bank economists whose pay is tied to how many loans they churn out

.. “One of the most difficult things to do in a large bureaucracy is to change incentives,

.. “And if you have a large bureaucracy full of economists it is especially hard, because it turns out that economists really hate it when you change the incentives.”

.. On Wednesday, the bank’s top economist, Paul Romer, abruptly resigned.

.. His end came after he claimed, in an interview with The Wall Street Journal, that the World Bank’s closely-watched report on business conditions in different countries had been altered for political reasons.

.. the bank tends to see private sector solutions — those involving the profit motive — as morally questionable.

.. World Bank staffers are used to talking to governments, and now they have to leverage the private sector? It is a different skill set, and flexibility is not the hallmark of development institutions.”

.. “He had to work against his own incentives,” Mr. Kim said, referring to the bank’s practice of rewarding staff for loans. “And that is part of the institutional problem here.”

.. “He has pursued a strategy of making himself popular in Davos by attacking the organization and its staff,” said Lant Pritchett, a retired World Bank executive. “It is this idea that his hand has been hampered by bureaucratic machinations. That may be accepted in Davos — but it’s completely false.”

.. His biggest coup was working with Ivanka Trump

.. They eventually settled in Muscatine, Iowa, where Mr. Kim was a high school quarterback before going on to Brown and securing advanced medical and anthropology degrees from Harvard.

.. Mr. Kim concluded by announcing that the bank would no longer back oil and gas drilling projects.

Health Care in Iowa Shows Peril for Both Political Parties

At his town-hall meeting in Guthrie Center, Mr. Grassley got an earful from residents whose premiums have risen and choices dwindled as insurers that offer plans in the state’s ACA marketplace have fled, potentially leaving Iowa without any major companies offering plans in 2018.

The defections have turned Iowa into a poster child for Republicans who assert that former President Barack Obama’s health law has failed and must be replaced.

“Iowa is in a world of hurt, and something has to be done because Obamacare is a total disaster,” said Guthrie County resident Vinita Smith, a Republican retiree who used to work as a clerk in the state legislature.

.. Democrats, meanwhile, argue that Iowa’s coverage gains under the Medicaid expansion that took place under the Affordable Care Act—about 150,000 Iowans were added to the program— could be swept away by the GOP effort to slash billions from the program.

.. Iowa insurers had particular trouble setting up networks with low prices because there are few providers and hospitals to compete against one another in the state’s many rural areas.

Insurers who participated in the Iowa exchange expected to be reimbursed by under what is know as a risk-corridor program set up by the ACA. But Republicans limited funding for the payments, and insurers received a fraction of the money they requested.

Meanwhile, an Obama administration decision to allow states to let people keep insurance plans they already had—even if they didn’t comply with ACA requirements—permitted younger and healthier people to stay on those less-robust plans. That drove older and sicker people to plans that did comply, leaving those insurers with higher costs and heavier financial losses.

.. “The individual market was broken before the ACA

Iowa Police Arrest Suspect in ‘Ambush’ Killings of 2 Officers

Two police officers were shot and killed early Wednesday while sitting in their patrol cars in the Des Moines area, and the authorities later arrested a 46-year-old Iowa man in connection with the “ambush-style attacks.”

.. Scott Greene is shown being escorted from an Urbandale High School football game two days earlier. In the video, the man is angry because, he says, someone at the game took away the Confederate flag he was holding.

.. Throughout the 10-minute video, the officers tell the man he is being accused of causing a disturbance inside the stadium. He continues to demand the return of his flag and asks them to file charges against the person who took the flag.

“I was peacefully protesting,” he said, repeatedly asking whether he had committed a crime.

Outside the stadium, the man tells the officers that he wants to file assault charges against the “African-American people that were behind me” who he said took the flag.

Iowa farmers ripped out prairie; now some hope it can save them

“The reason why we have the best soil, making it possible to have the world’s best food production, is prairie,” said Lisa Schulte Moore, an Iowa State professor known around the state as the prairie guru. “And we’re killing it.”

.. Providing wildlife habitat for birds and animals on the decline is one of the driving forces behind a program called STRIPS — Science-based Trials of Rowcrops Integrated with Prairie Strips. Smith said he planted his prairie two years ago because he strongly believed in that philosophy.

.. “People who don’t work with farmers view them as curmudgeons,” Schulte Moore said. “But they’re savvy and very data oriented. They get it.”

.. When rain soaks the field, the deep-rooted prairie “slows it down,” Smith said, and allows the earth to absorb it.

Tests show that the nitrate level in water from Smith’s farm is substantially lower than water in the creek, Schulte Moore said.

.. How much time do Iowa farmers have?

The state’s soil is eroding at an alarming rate. Topsoil was an average of 14 inches deep statewide in the mid-1800s; now it’s about six

.. Iowa farmers lose about $40 per acre to soil erosion in a state where more than 85 percent of the land is covered by crops. “If you look at those figures and the amount of corn acres in Iowa, you quickly surpass a billion dollars of annual lost revenue,” Cruse said. Nearly a third of topsoil is lost in ephemeral gullies, swaths carved into farms by heavy rain.

.. Midwest states have to take responsibility for the pollution they produce, he said. “No one’s disputing that there is a dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico, and no one is disputing that years and years of phosphorous have made their way down the rivers of the Midwest,” he said.