Obama appointee abruptly resigns as head of World Bank
Officially, Jim Yong Kim, the Korean-American serving his second five-year term as head of the World Bank after being first appointed by President Obama in 2012, "resigned." But the "tell" is that he suddenly found an opportunity in an unnamed private firm doing more or less the same thing but on a smaller scale.
Kim told World Bank employees in an email that he was leaving the world's largest lender and donor to poor and middle-income countries on February 1 to join a private-sector firm focused on infrastructure investments in the developing world.
"The opportunity to join the private sector was unexpected, but I've concluded that this is the path through which I will be able to make the largest impact on major global issues like climate change and the infrastructure deficit in emerging markets," Kim said.
My suspicion is that he was pressured to leave because of his obvious policy differences with President Trump:
Kim, nominated by former US President Barack Obama for two five-year terms, had pushed financing for green energy projects and largely dropped support for coal power investments, but had avoided public clashes with the Trump administration, which has made reviving the US coal sector a priority.
The U.S. has the power to appoint the head of the international body because we financed its creation and pay the most for it. The New York Times explains:
Since the institutions were created at the end of World War II, an American has led the World Bank and a European has led the International Monetary Fund. But there have been rumblings in recent years about changing that tradition, and some have suggested that if Mr. Trump makes an unorthodox selection, other countries on the bank's board could break precedent and block his pick.
My response, which I bet Secretary Mnuchin shares, is "Go ahead, make my day." Those other countries are welcome to step up with funding. If the World Bank wants to hitch itself to the warmist fraud, let other board members step up with cash in hand.
Kim was Obama's pawn from the start. Read this admitting account from Quartz of how he got his job, and ponder what it says about him.
According to Kim, Obama looked at him and said, "So, Jim, why would I nominate you to be president of the World Bank? Why wouldn't I nominate a macroeconomist?"
"Well, president Obama," Kim replied, as he recalls, "have you read your mother's Ph.D dissertation?"
Obama's mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, was an activist and anthropologist who spent years living in Indonesia, researching village craft industries, particularly metalworking, but also pottery and batik. Her PhD thesis, based on several years of field studies, was published in 1992, three years before her death. Kim says he was "one of, like, 10 people who ordered her 1,000-page dissertation" from her school's archive, and he read every word of it.
Buh-bye, Dr. Kim.
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