The Guardian view on the IMF and World Bank: back a global Green New Deal | Editorial
The International Monetary Fund and the World Bank have their 75th birthday this year, but the organisations that emerged from the Bretton Woods conference in 1944 are in no real mood to celebrate at their annual meetings this week. In Washington the mood is decidedly downbeat. Global growth is slowing; the conviction that low interest rates are here to stay is encouraging reckless behaviour and a dangerous build-up of debt; the climate-change clock is ticking louder. The threat of a new financial crisis is growing. The prospect of it being triggered by a climate emergency is real.
Yet the problems of the two Bretton Woods institutions run deeper than that. They are bodies created to foster international cooperation at a time when international cooperation is marked by its absence. Born out of the economic chaos of the 1930s, the IMF and the World Bank had a well-defined mission three quarters of a century ago: to rebuild war-shattered economies; to provide support to countries that ran into balance-of-payments difficulties; to limit currency turbulence; and to encourage the opening up of markets.
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