James D. Wolfensohn, Who Led the World Bank for 10 Years, Dies at 86

Another Wolfensohn initiative was to shift the bank’s policy on debt incurred by its mostly impoverished African and South American client countries. Instead of insisting on repayment, he sought to write off much of the debt.

“How, I reasoned, could you have a lending business to borrowers of low credit and then pretend that you would be repaid 100 percent on every loan?” he wrote. “I thought that any system that relied on this logic was doomed.”

Catching something of a popular wave, including support from Pope John Paul II (who cited the absolving of debt in Leviticus), World Bank directors in 1996 approved $500 million for a relief trust fund; three years later, they relaxed eligibility for faster and deeper debt relief.

Mr. Wolfensohn said he was particularly proud of having installed a high-speed communications network linking affiliates in 80 countries, allowing interactive video conferencing and distance learning. “Modest, he wasn’t,” declared Fauzia S. Rashid, a staff member who worked with him.

A Family Scraping By

James David Wolfensohn was born on Dec. 1, 1933, and grew up in Sydney, Australia, where his parents, Hyman and Dora Wolfensohn, had moved from London in 1928. The family, which included an older sister, Betty, was always in financial stress even though his father had at one time moved in the upper echelons of British society: He had met James Armand de Rothschild in the British Army and then served as his private secretary, before having a falling-out that the elder Mr. Wolfensohn never explained.

The family’s failure to establish itself in Australia weighed heavily on young James from about the age of 7, producing an obsession with monetary insecurity that carried long into his adult life.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/25/business/economy/james-d-wolfensohn-dead.html