Zoellick Replaces Wolfowitz at the World Bank

Robert Zoellick was appointed Wednesday to replace embattled Paul Wolfowitz as president of the World Bank. Zoellick is currently a managing director at Goldman Sachs in New York.

But Larry Kudlow says nice as the Zoellick appointment may be, the World Bank and IMF are really obsolete:

"Free market capitalism is spreading like gangbusters across the
globe, and with it, the proliferation of private capital markets to channel
investment everywhere. Instead of making cheap loans at below market rates to
state planning governments in Africa and elsewhere, the real key to fighting
poverty is putting markets—not World Bank bureaucrats—in the driver’s seat.

Both the IMF and the World Bank are unnecessary artifacts from a bygone, post-WWII reconstruction era. Instead of government-to-government lending, poor nations need pro-market reforms that will then attract private capital flows. This will subject low-income nations to the same marketplace discipline that China, India, Russia, Eastern Europe and Latin America have all been subjected to."

Kudlow goes on to say that since capital markets are hijacking the World Bank's mission, and the bureaucrats there know it, it will be up to Zoellick to exercise discipline to keep the liberal bank employees from morphing the organization into a gargantuan global warming bureaucracy.

Also, Kudlow thinks it was Wolfowitz's pro-war stand in Iraq, rather than his girlfriend, that made him so unpopular at the bank.

Zoellick, who's rumored to have a sharp focus and even sharper temper, clearly has his work cut out for him. Eco-extremists, and all the AlGore crowd, already dislike him immensely.