The World’s Banker by Sebastian Mallaby

Description

A decade that shaped the developing world — through one extraordinary banker. Sebastian Mallaby — acclaimed columnist and author of More Money Than God — turns his masterful reporting to James Wolfensohn, the flamboyant Australian-born investment banker who led the World Bank from 1995 to 2005, one of the most consequential and controversial decades in global development.

Wolfensohn arrived promising to remake the Bank as a humane, listening institution: expanding lending to fight poverty, confronting corruption head-on, and dragging a sclerotic bureaucracy toward the real world. Mallaby follows him from Wall Street boardrooms to villages across Africa and Asia, tracing landmark battles over debt relief, governance reform, AIDS funding, and the eternal question of what development is actually for — and who gets to decide.

Sweeping, judicious, and full of larger-than-life characters, The World’s Banker is essential for anyone interested in global economics, institutional power, or the idealists who try to steer giant ships — and a clear-eyed lesson in how hard the steering really is.

Sebastian Mallaby, the acclaimed columnist and author of More Money Than God, turns his masterful reporting to James Wolfensohn, the flamboyant Australian-born banker who led the World Bank from 1995 to 2005. The World’s Banker: A Story of Failed States, Financial Crises, and the Wealth and Poverty of Nations is a sweeping account of one of the most consequential — and controversial — decades in global development.

Wolfensohn arrived at the Bank promising to remake it as a humane, listening institution, expanding lending to fight poverty while confronting corruption head-on. Mallaby follows him from the boardrooms of Wall Street to villages across Africa and Asia, tracing landmark battles over debt relief, the Asian financial crisis, and the Bank’s uneasy relationship with its critics.

Drawing on hundreds of interviews and remarkable access, Mallaby delivers a balanced, deeply human portrait of a charismatic leader wrestling with impossible contradictions — and, through him, an inside history of the institution at the center of the globalization debate.

Published in 2004 to wide acclaim, The World’s Banker is essential reading for anyone interested in economics, international affairs, and the human drama behind the policies that shape the developing world.