World Bank Major Change?

So, earlier this year Jim Yong Kim announced he would be stepping down early as president of the World Bank and Donald Trump has recently nominated David Malpass (who currently works for the US treasury) to take his seat.

Malpass, however, has been pretty open about his criticisms towards the institution, describing the bank as part of a “giant sprawl” of international organizations that create “mountains of debt without solving problems”.

In an article in The Economist, the author ends with:

His appointment will also revive China’s fears that the existing international institutions will never truly accommodate it. But policymakers in Beijing may calculate that Mr Malpass is less dangerous at the World Bank than at the Treasury, especially if he seeks to curb the bank’s limited powers further. A determined China hawk could lead the World Bank on an expansive drive to compete with China’s chequebook diplomacy. A cost-cutting crusader could stringently curtail the bank’s budget and ambitions. Someone who is torn between these two tendencies will probably do neither.

Another article in the Financial Times, however, believes this to be a bad move and considers Malpass an ill-fit candidate:

Mr Malpass has the potential to be considerably worse . His judgment even on economics, his supposed speciality, is wanting. Notoriously, as then chief economist at Bear Stearns, Mr Malpass was blithely confident about the strength of the US economy in 2007 — a year before the global financial crisis hit and his own employer went under. As early as 2011 he suggested tightening monetary policy and driving up the dollar, a hard-money philosophy entirely at odds with the reality that the Fed had averted economic disaster.

Was interested in what peoples thoughts were. Do you think he's a good pick? Apart from cutting funds to China, what other impact might Malpass' appointment have on the World Bank overall?

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