FirstFT: Janet Yellen sets out US ambitions to reform World Bank

The US Treasury secretary Janet Yellen has outlined the White House’s push to transform the World Bank into a lending organisation to drive the transition to green energy.

Setting out her priorities for a meeting of G20 finance ministers over the next two days, Yellen said the US was looking to “evolve the World Bank” following the abrupt resignation of its president David Malpass last week.

The World Bank’s board said yesterday that there would be an “open, merit-based and transparent” selection process to pick the successor to Trump-appointed Malpass who is expected to leave by June 30. It said it hoped to select a new president by early May.

The US is the leading shareholder in the bank and traditionally nominates the president. China, Japan, Germany, France and the UK are also leading shareholders of the institution, which has a total of 189 member countries.

There is not yet a preferred US choice for the role but Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, the current director-general of the World Trade Organization, is seen as one of the leading contenders who would be expected to put climate change at the heart of the bank’s work.

Other candidates include Gayle Smith, chief executive of the ONE Campaign that fights extreme poverty and preventable diseases, and Samantha Power, current head of USAID and a former US ambassador to the UN.

The leading male contender is Rajiv Shah, president of the Rockefeller Foundation, while climate finance expert Mafalda Duarte has also been mentioned following her work on providing finance to developing countries.

Five more stories in the news

1. Exclusive: west probes potential sanctions busting The EU and its allies are investigating a surge in exports to economies in Russia’s vicinity, as they seek to prevent companies from evading western sanctions via a back door to Moscow. “We see a massive fall-off in trade flows from the EU to Russia and unusual spikes in trade with other third countries, particularly with those in close vicinity to Russia,” the EU’s newly appointed sanctions envoy told the FT.

2. Most Fed officials backed quarter-point rate rise The vast majority of Federal Reserve officials supported slowing the pace of US interest rate rises to 0.25 percentage points last month, according to the minutes from their most recent meeting. But officials also said that an insufficiently restrictive policy could “halt” recent progress in moderating inflation.

3. Mexico’s Senate approves big cuts to election agency Mexico’s Senate yesterday gave its final approval to a legal reform that will gut the vast majority of the country’s professional election bureaucracy — a move the opposition warns would put democracy at risk.

4. Eskom chief ousted after TV broadside South Africa’s power monopoly Eskom has removed its chief executive André de Ruyter with immediate effect, after a television interview in which he accused senior politicians of corruption and said the company had been infiltrated by crime cartels. De Ruyter departed yesterday just a month before he was scheduled to leave having already resigned from the utility.

5. Hacker group targets thousands of networks A mysterious and unidentified group of hackers dubbed the Nevada Group has sought to paralyse the computer networks of almost 5,000 victims across the US and Europe, in one of the most widespread ransomware attacks on record. Authorities have yet to identify the perpetrators, suspected to be from Russia and China.

The day ahead

Market outlook Investors in Asia and Europe have taken heart from some strong earnings, including from US chipmaker Nvidia. Futures contracts tracking the blue-chip S&P 500 rose 0.5 per cent today, while the equivalent for the tech-heavy Nasdaq jumped 1 per cent.

Economic data The US commerce department will release its second estimate for US gross domestic product during the fourth quarter of 2022. The first reading indicated that the US economy grew at an annual rate of 2.9 per cent in the final three months of the year, and economists expect the reading to hold steady.

Company earnings Biotech company Moderna, Ticketmaster-owner Live Nation and beverage producer Keurig Dr Pepper will report earnings today. Media group Warner Bros. Discovery and payments group Block also release results.

What else we’re reading

The insular decision-making that led to Putin’s invasion The FT spoke to longtime confidants of Vladimir Putin as well as people involved in Moscow’s war effort for this account of how the Russian president blundered his way into the invasion of Ukraine — and then intensified his efforts rather than admit his mistake. Since the war began, Putin has become even more isolated, consulting only a small circle of advisers.

• ‘As long as it takes’: US president Joe Biden’s impassioned speech in Poland vowing to stand by Ukraine may not play as well at home, writes Felicia Schwartz.

Carter has been wronged by history Conventional wisdom insists that former US president Jimmy Carter played Chamberlain to Ronald Reagan’s Churchill. After four years of Carterian vacillation, Reagan grabbed the reins in 1981 and the rest is history. Except that it is shoddy history, argues Edward Luce.

Google claims quantum computing breakthrough Google has marked an early but potentially significant step in overcoming the biggest technical barrier in today’s quantum computing, where information is lost too quickly to be useful. The company’s findings, published in the journal Nature, mark a “milestone on our journey to build a useful quantum computer”, said Hartmut Neven, head of Google’s quantum efforts.

Nigeria votes: Tinubu still confident despite setbacks Bola Tinubu, governor of Lagos state from 1999 to 2007, is viewed as a political godfather in Nigeria’s sprawling economic capital. Analysts say the ruling party candidate retains a slight edge ahead of this weekend’s presidential polls despite suffering setbacks, thanks in part to a powerful electoral machine.

Adani’s ties with Modi spur scrutiny of overseas deals The Adani Group, whose owner Gautam Adani has longstanding ties with Indian prime minister Narendra Modi, has in recent years clinched deals in countries from Myanmar to Israel as part of an ambitious overseas expansion. Following a short seller’s allegations of fraud at the Adani Group, which the Indian conglomerate has denied, the opposition in India is now scrutinising Modi, who they say enabled the foreign deals.

Take a break from the news

David Bowie’s vast collection of personal items — including flamboyant Ziggy Stardust costumes, handwritten lyrics and the Stylophone used in “Space Oddity” — has been donated to the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.