David Malpass, US President Donald Trump’s nominee to lead the World Bank, won unanimous approval from the World Bank’s executive board on April 5, 2019, continuing the 73-year tradition of an American running the world’s largest development lender.

Malpass, the US Treasury’s undersecretary for international affairs, assumed his new role on April 9, 2019 as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund Spring Meetings get under-way. In a phone interview with Reuters, Malpass said he would uphold the bank’s commitment to reducing poverty in the poorest countries and to fight climate change, and pursue goals stated in a $ 13 billion capital increase last year. In an email to World Bank employees, Malpass emphasized the need to fight extreme poverty and “foster broad based growth for each and every borrower, and a stronger, more stable global economy for all.”

Since taking his job at the Treasury in 2017, Malpass had been critical of the World Bank’s continued lending to China, arguing that the world’s second-largest economy was too wealthy for such aid while it was loading up some countries with unsustainable debt from its Belt and Road infrastructure program. ....Read more