Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
The World Bank was created at the 1944 Bretton Woods Conference, along with the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The president of the World Bank is traditionally an American. [12] The World Bank and the IMF are both based in Washington, D.C., and work closely with each other.
Rev. Duncan established the small bank in order to encourage his working class congregation to develop thrift. Another precursor to the modern savings bank originated in Germany, with Franz Hermann Schulze-Delitzsch and Friedrich Wilhelm Raiffeisen who developed cooperative banking models that led on to the credit union movement.
The World Bank Institute is the capacity development branch of the World Bank, providing learning and other capacity-building programs to member countries. The IBRD has 189 member governments, and the other institutions have between 153 and 184. [2] The institutions of the World Bank Group are all run by a board of governors meeting once a year ...
Stability came when national banks guaranteed to change silver money into gold at a fixed rate; it did, however, not come easily. The Bank of England risked a national financial catastrophe in the 1730s when customers demanded their money be changed into gold in a moment of crisis. Eventually London's merchants saved the bank and the nation ...
Former World Bank Chief Economist and former chairman of the U.S. Council of Economic Advisers Joseph E. Stiglitz referred in the late 1990s to a growing consensus that something is wrong with a system having the capacity to impose high costs on a great number of people who are hardly even participants in international financial markets ...
The World Bank Group is the globe's most prestigious development lender, bankrolling hundreds of government projects each year in pursuit of its high-minded mission: to combat the scourge of poverty by backing new transit systems, power plants, dams and other projects it believes will help boost the fortunes of poor people.
The World Bank has regularly failed to live up to its own policies for protecting people harmed by projects it finances. The World Bank and its private-sector lending arm, the International Finance Corp., have financed governments and companies accused of human rights violations such as rape, murder and torture.
In northern Peru, the World Bank's business-lending arm is part owner of the Yanacocha gold mine, accused by impoverished farming communities of despoiling their land in pursuit of the precious ore. The bank and IFC have stepped up investments in projects deemed to have a high risk of serious and environment damage, including oil pipelines, mines and even coal-fired power plants, an ...