Free Republic

Investors betting big against catastrophic diseases are watching the World Health Organization closely as insurance bonds tied to whether the organization labels COVID-19 a pandemic are set to mature in June.In 2017, the World Bank designed a new way to raise money: Pandemic Emergency Financing bonds. Over $425 million worth of such bonds, which bet against a global outbreak of infectious diseases and will default if WHO declares the coronavirus a pandemic, were sold by the World Bank in its first-ever issuance of catastrophe bonds. In the event of no pandemic, investors would be paid a healthy annualized return. Meanwhile,...

Trending on Twitter: Molly Jong-Fast, notorious Twitter Trump-hater and pathetic hack "journalist", writes for The Daily Beast about her interview with Lisa Page, noted Fibbie "woman-about-town". It's Festivus Day for little Lisa!!https://twitter.com/search?q=%22Lisa%20Page%22Lisa Page Speaks: ‘There’s No Fathomable Way I Have Committed Any Crime at All'https://www.thedailybeast.com/lisa-page-speaks-theres-no-fathomable-way-i-have-committed-any-crime-at-all

Twitter chief Jack Dorsey said this week that he plans to move to Africa for up to six months next year. The tech executive announced the planned move following a month-long trip visiting entrepreneurs on the continent. “Sad to be leaving the continent … for now. Africa will define the future (especially the bitcoin one!),” Dorsey tweeted from Addis Ababa on Wednesday. “Not sure where yet, but I’ll be living here for 3-6 months mid 2020. Grateful I was able to experience a small part.” Asked for comment, Twitter said in an email: “We’ve nothing to share beyond Jack’s initial...

The winding roads into the valley of Nebaj are lined with advertisements for cheap loans. Banks and cooperatives and microfinance operations make their pitches: “Credit in three days.” “Funding for your small business.” “We’ve lowered our interest rates!” U.S. officials have long touted the power of finance to lift people out of poverty — and backed loans to farmers and small-business owners across the developing world. But here in the Guatemala Highlands, the epicenter of the country’s migrant exodus, those loans often fund a different activity, the region’s most profitable: Smuggling migrants north to the United States. Over the past...

Kristalina Georgieva, the new managing director of the International Monetary Fund, applauded the Trump administration's "bravery to use a tax reform to spur more growth" in an exclusive interview with "Axios on HBO." Why it matters: Georgieva vowed that she would be able to persuade the U.S. to commit more money to the fund during the course of her five-year term. "I will get my quota increase," she said — in the face of reported U.S. opposition and a U.S. veto over any changes. Georgieva comes to the IMF from the World Bank, where she was CEO and where she...

President Obama infamously told Africans they should focus on their “bountiful” wind, solar and biofuel. If they use “dirty” fossil fuels to raise living standards “to the point where everybody has got a car, and everybody has got air conditioning, and everybody has got a big house, well, the planet will boil over.” So when South Africa applied for a World Bank loan to finish its low-pollution coal-fired Medupi power plant, his administration voted “present,” and the loan was approved by a bare majority of other bank member nations. The Obama Overseas Private Investment Corporation refused to support construction of...

The Case for Trump by the political and military scholar Victor Davis Hanson is a book dedicated to the "Deplorables." It is a fact-based analysis of why Donald Trump was able to win the presidency in 2016. Beyond that, Hanson sat down with American Thinker and discussed the presidential election in 2020. Donald Trump ran against both political parties and the East Coast establishment in the 2016 presidential election. He was the first man ever elected to the nation's highest office without prior experience in government, politics, or the military. In a nutshell, Trump appealed to a forgotten but sizable...

The British Prime Minister Theresa May now asking the European Union for a delay on Brexit until June 30th..... Wikileaks tweeting that two Ecuadorean government sources are telling them that its founder Julian Assange will be expelled within "hours to days" from Ecuador's Embassy in London and that there is an agreement with the British authorities to arrest Assange...... The final polls are being published ahead of Israel's election on Tuesday..... Week 21 of the Yellow Vests protests in France... The meeting between Italy's Interior Minister-League Party leader Matteo Salvini and France's National Rally leader Marine Le Pen in Paris...

Trudeau’s government was already shabby before this scandal broke—all style and no substance. But even the harshest critics of the bumptious Trudeau could not have expected to be thinking now in terms of criminal corruption Canada’s SNC Lavalin bribery scandal strikes at the heart of the legitimacy of capitalism operating presumptively under the rule of law. It also strikes at the foundations of credible accountability—read honesty and lawful conduct—in the office of Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. It’s been common knowledge for years that SNC Lavalin engaged in corrupt practices, both at home and abroad. The immediate focus is the...

The American media has focused recently on the newly released Green New Deal (GND), a resolution sponsored by U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and U.S. Sen. Ed Markey that would fundamentally transform America’s energy policy and move closer to their socialist vision for the country. As a resolution, the GND has no power to actually regulate or tax but gives left-leaning congressmen and potential presidential candidates a vehicle to virtue-signal their embrace of a radical, anti-fossil fuel agenda. One day before the much-ballyhooed release of the GND, and flying mostly under the radar, President Trump made an announcement that could have...

President Donald Trump plans to nominate David Malpass, a Trump administration critic of the World Bank, to lead the institution. That’s according to a senior administration official who spoke on condition of anonymity because the official wasn’t authorized to comment publicly on personnel decisions.Trump is expected to make an announcement later this week. Malpass, the undersecretary for international affairs at the Treasury Department, has been a sharp critic of the World Bank, especially over its lending to China. …

President Trump interviewed the wife of Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, for the top job at the World Bank, according to a report. Heidi Cruz met with Trump this week in the Oval Office about the post, but the president is going to select another candidate for the position, Bloomberg's Jennifer Jacobs reported Wednesday.

Former United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon appealed for a sense of urgency Tuesday as he launched a new commission that aims to accelerate and expand ways the world can prepare for climate change. “Without urgent adaptation action, we risk undermining food, energy and water security for decades to come,” Ban told guests as the Global Commission on Adaptation got underway in The Hague. The commission’s mandate is to encourage the development of measures to manage the effects of climate change through technology, planning and investment. Ban is leading the group with Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and World Bank CEO Kristalina...

... Until recently, the consequences of climate change were thought to be so far into the future that many average people, including those who live in coastal zones, declared they needn’t bother; they’d be long dead by the time catastrophe struck. No more. Climate change is here, costing billions of dollars every year to recover from destructive events. Without adapting to that new reality, the world will confront rising costs of disasters that put economic growth, health, and in some places, even survival at risk. To spur action, a coalition led by billionaire Bill Gates, former United Nations Secretary General...

The Trump administration is expected to support a $13 billion capital increase for the World Bank in a deal that will reform the development bank’s lending rules and increase China’s shareholding, three people close to the matter said on Friday. U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin is expected to lend his support for the plan at next week’s World Bank and International Monetary Fund spring meetings, the sources said. But the deal will need an endorsement from the World Bank’s shareholders and approval from its board of directors. “Barring unforeseen challenges, there will be a capital increase,” one of the sources...

The big political news from last week was David Brat’s upset win over Eric Cantor for Congress. Brat is an economics professor at Randolph Macon and from his research it’s clear that he has strong political views embedded in his economics. It’s perfectly fine to be a political economist, but when it leads to an obviously flawed understanding and presentation of reality then it becomes a real problem in my opinion. For instance, in his website Brat says the following: “Our national debt has skyrocketed, reaching over $17 trillion dollars. What our leaders in Washington fail to mention is...

President Donald Trump’s tougher immigration enforcement has reduced the flow of people heading north across the U.S.-Mexico border, but it has had no effect on the amount of money heading in the opposite direction. In fact, Mexico is on pace to receive more remittances from abroad in 2017 than it ever has before, according to World Bank estimates released Tuesday. Mexico, which takes in more remittances than any other Latin American country by a wide margin, will likely receive $30.5 billion from the Mexican diaspora living abroad — 6.5 percent more than it did in 2016. About 95 percent of...

Two Arab countries have pledged to donate $100 million towards a fund designed for women entrepreneurs proposed by the president’s eldest daughter and adviser Ivanka Trump, according to a report. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates will contribute $100 million towards the World Bank’s Women Entrepreneurs Fund, which Ivanka proposed, the Wall Street Journal reported. ABC News reported that World Bank president Jim Yong Kim announced the countries’ pledge at a Sunday event on women’s economic empowerment with Ivanka. At the event, Ivanka praised Saudi Arabia for making “progress” as a nation towards empowering women, but she added that...

President Trump’s first foreign trip has brought a big benefit to his daughter's pet project. As Trump traveled the Middle East, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates pledged $100 million to a fund for women entrepreneurs proposed by Ivanka Trump, according to a report. The Wall Street Journal reported Saudi Arabia and the U.A.E. would donate to the Women Entrepreneurs Fund, a program Ivanka Trump pitched to World Bank Group President Jim Yong Kim and has discussed with several world leaders. The fund’s money will be controlled by World Bank, not Ivanka, but she continues fundraising for it even...

Ivanka Trump has been involved in discussions with the World Bank about establishing a funding operation that would support female entrepreneurs, bank and administration officials said Wednesday. The officials stressed that nothing has been set up yet and that talks are ongoing about how this would be set up. They said it could be structured as a World Bank-run "facility," which accepts contributions from governments and private donors and then provides funding and support to women in developing countries. According to a senior administration official, Trump recently pitched the idea to World Bank Group President Jim Yong Kim, who then...