Yellen Calls for World Bank Overhaul Including Scaled-Up Lending

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen will propose changes for the World Bank and regional development banks Thursday, pushing them to move beyond country-specific loans to address global threats and speed the flow of private capital to poor and emerging economies, Bloomberg News reported. “The evolution of these banks will require changes to incentives, operating models and uses of the banks’ financial resources,” Yellen plans to say in a speech she’s scheduled to deliver in Washington at the Center for Global Development think tank. Portions of the remarks were seen by Bloomberg News. The Treasury chief will endorse the notion that multilateral development banks can substantially increase their lending without significantly increasing risk. The additional capacity at the World Bank, however, would be in the tens of billions of dollars, according to a senior Treasury official, not in the hundreds of billions suggested by a recent study commissioned by the Group of 20 largest economies. Read more.