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The World's Banker: A Story of Failed States, Financial Crises, and the Wealth and Poverty of Nations, Sebastian Mallaby (New York: Penguin Press, 2004), 400 pp., $29.95 cloth.
Sebastian Mallaby's The World's Banker is a very readable book that tells the story of James Wolfensohn, the World Bank's recently departed president, who served two five-year terms. It is an indication of Wolfensohn's high public profile that many people know his name, which cannot be assumed about his immediate predecessors (Lew Preston, unlikely; Barber Conable, perhaps). No one else has been so closely associated with critical decisions defining the world's premier development bank since Robert McNamara, the former U.S. secretary of defense, who served as president during another critical decade, the 1970s.
Wolfensohn is a larger-than-life figure: a self-made man, banker, cellist, and philanthropist. Even while making millions of dollars as a private banker, Wolfensohn set his sights on becoming World Bank president, giving up his Australian citizenship a decade before his appointment to increase the prospects, and eventually outmaneuvering Lawrence Summers, the former Bank economist and Clinton cabinet member, to secure a nomination from President Clinton. During Wolfensohn's tenure, the Bank broke with a discredited history of structural adjustment, overcame resistance to facing critical issues of debt relief and corruption, shook up a stultified bureaucracy, moved more than 70 percent of country managers out of Washington into the client countries, adopted the language of participation and local ownership, and brought the critics into the discussion.
The World's Banker is a smart journalist's account of the story of a man and some of the key events that served to transform or give substance to his vision. There is travelogue, personal anecdote, and the intricate reconstruction of events that serve as exemplars of some larger argument. Each chapter is structured around an event or series of events that highlight policy choices. For example, an early trip to Mali tells the story of how Wolfensohn acquired a vision for what the Bank could be when dynamic staff were engaged directly in the countries...