World Bank President will step down
World Bank president James Wolfensohn has acknowledged what has been openly speculated, that he may — not will — step down during 2005:
“I’ve had 10 years, and I think that’s probably enough,” Wolfensohn said on ABC’s “This Week” when asked whether he would like to stay beyond his second five-year term. “But if the need is there, I’ll do whatever the [bank's member countries] want. My understanding and my belief is that probably during the course of this year I’ll give over to someone else.”
And the World Bank position is traditionally political in the bilateral US-EU relationship:
By tradition, the United States, the largest shareholder among the World Bank’s 184 member nations, chooses an American to head the bank, while Europe gets to choose the head of the International Monetary Fund.
Throughout his 8 1/2 year tenure, Wolfensohn has been and is intellectually peripatetic, intelligent, shrewd, flamboyant, often praised, and often provocative:
Although he won plenty of admirers, including many in aid groups that had long criticized the bank, he drew derision from others who viewed his management style as chaotic and wasteful of bank resources.
Which brings us back to Wolfensohn’s coy declaration. Re-read it and you’ll see that he isn’t resigning, or even promising to resign — he’s just musing that he “probably” will. That, my friends, is known as maintaining leverage and avoiding premature lame-duckery.
