Fed Bans Two Ex-Goldman Bankers From Industry

The Federal Reserve Board of Governors has barred former Goldman Sachs Group Inc. investment bankers Tim Leissner and Roger Ng from working in the banking industry because of their alleged involvement in illegally diverting funds from Malaysian state investment fund1Malaysia Development Bhd.

The Fed said Tuesday Mr. Leissner, the former head of Goldman’s Southeast Asia business, agreed to his ban from the industry and has been fined $1.42 million.

In 2012 and 2013, Messrs. Leissner and Ng worked on bond offerings for the sovereign wealth fund, known as 1MDB, the Fed said. Money that was diverted from the fund was used to bribe government officials and for the “conspirators’ personal benefit,” the Fed said in a statement.

The New York-based investment bank raised $6.5 billion for 1MDB, and authorities have alleged $2.7 billion of funds were stolen.

.. Mr. Leissner pleaded guilty last year to U.S. charges of conspiracy to launder money and violate antibribery laws. He is due to be sentenced June 28. The attorney general in Malaysia filed charges against the former Goldman banker last year.

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.

State-run economies increasingly adore the free market

Angela Merkel warned against growing government intervention in international trade: “If we are of the opinion that things are simply not fair, then we have to seek multilateral answers and not pursue a unilateral protectionist course where we isolate ourselves.” She was largely defending the Washington Consensus , a catchall term that suggests politics and economics ought to inhabit separate spheres. This is the orthodoxy upon which the current international order is based.

But that consensus is coming apart because, more than ever, state-led capitalism works — and it is here to stay. China’s consolidation of its state-owned enterprises (SOEs), Russia’s oligarch-led economy, the proliferation of sovereign wealth funds (SWFs) and growing government intervention in the West are clear indicators of state-led capitalism’s success.

.. Moscow is able to use these corporations for political ends: threatening gas supplies to keep European governments compliant, for instance, or directing energy revenue to finance military development.

.. The Sovereign Wealth Fund Institute reports that there are dozens of SWFs, including 24 created in the past decade, which collectively control more than $7 trillion in assets.

.. SWFs are an important feature of today’s global economic landscape; governments also use them as agents of statecraft. SWFs in the Persian Gulf region, for instance, are investing in Russia because of concerns about America’s regional staying power, and they are deepening ties with Muslim countries in Southeast Asia to ensure export markets and potentially to facilitate counter-radicalization initiatives.

 .. And in the United States, President Trump has bragged that he personally influences firms’ decisions about where to place their factories.
.. This is a dramatic reversal of the trend from two decades ago.

.. But a number of factors led to skepticism about free markets. One was the underwhelming developmental effect of SAPs and liberalization.

A further blow to the neoliberal model was a series of financial disasters caused by unrestricted flows of capital, notably the 1997 Asian financial crisis and the 2008 global financial crisis.
Perhaps the factor that has most undermined neoliberalism’s attractiveness, though, is the persistent power of countries with state-led economies, such as China and Russia.
.. We are not seeing a “universalization of Western liberal democracy” and free-market capitalism, as Francis Fukuyama predicted