Within minutes of Robert Zoellick’s announcement that he will leave the world bank being made public, Hillary Clinton announced that she was interested in the job. The World Bank has long been a favored retirement village for American warhawks. Considering the fact that World Bank is ostensibly about making loans to developing counties for capital improvements, it’s significant that three of the 11 World Bank presidents (Robert McNamara, Paul Wolfowitz and John McCloy) have come from the U.S. Department of Defense/War. Now Clinton, while not at the DOD, but very much the architect of the American war on Libya, wants the job. I suppose that after years of bombing developing countries into rubble, people like Clinton and Wolfowitz and McNamara think it might be fun to assuage their consciences by lending money to developing countries.
Whether such loans actually help matters for these countries if hardly clear. Given that the World Bank was founded by Keynesians at Bretton Woods, one might be somewhat skeptical of the economics and politics put forward as the justification for the scheme. On the other hand, we do know that the World Bank is a mechanism for exercising political control over the debtor nations. So it’s really just the same old story, and it’s fitting that agitators for wars of conquest find a home at the world bank. To paraphrase Carl von Clausewitz, perhaps the World Bank is war by other means.
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Hmm. . . I thought she would try to be vice president, replacing the equally terrible Biden, but this move doesn’t surprise me much. She’s a high-level bureaucrat that loves meaningless jobs like this and it’s not like they ever required anyone to know anything about markets at the World Bank. I’ve never thought of the fact that many warmongers tend to end up there, that is a very eerie circumstance.
Actually, I think Biden has been one of the more benign VP’s in a long time. Unless I’m just not paying attention, I really don’t hear or see much of him (thank goodness). This is totally different from that idiot Cheney who was in the news pretty much daily.
Isn’t the saintly Gordo, the man who saved the world, due this post as a token of respect ?
I agree, perfect fit for her.
So she has a Bachelor in Arts and a JD in Law.. What exactly are her qualifications for being president of the world bank again?
I’ve been reading the blogs for about a month, trying to just be a more informed citizen.. I’ve studied some of the Principles of Economics from Mankiw’s college textbook, and a few books from Ron Paul, just trying to get a good feel and so far I can say, without-a-doubt, Mises and Rothbard and Hayek don’t get enough credit.
End the Fed!
Keep on trucking guys, great work!
In her capacity as head of the World Bank, Hillary would be perfectly situated to resume her commodity futures speculating activities, by which she profited so handsomely–turned a $1K investment into $100K in less than a year–while she was wife of the governor of Arkansas and being guided in her speculative trading by a person associated with Tyson Foods, which was pursuing or receiving subsidies from the State of Arkansas and had a huge presence in the commodity futures markets. Some folks speculate that she was given some of Tyson’s profitable inter-day trades in return for her husband’s endorsement of Tyson’s subsidies. (see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillary_Rodham_cattle_futures_controversy) Imagine how much she could profit from her position as WB chief. The recently passed law against trading on insider information by members of Congress and their staff does not apply to WB personnel.
They have a much simpler way of bribing Chillary now, they just hire Bill to give a motivational speech at $1M per and write it off as a business expense.
http://www.csmonitor.com/Business/Mises-Economics/2012/0220/Hillary-Clinton-s-new-job-At-the-world-bank
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