World Bank Is Opening Its Treasure Chest of Data – NYTimes.com

I think this  is good, but haven’t had time to think it  through. It suggests that maybe someone in the USofA, a very powerful someone, a Republican someone, is looking for a new world. A New World. And that’s a TnT kind of  thing. New, but conservative, at the same time.

So it might come as a surprise that the president of the World Bank, Robert B. Zoellick, a career diplomat and member of the Republican foreign-policy elite, argues that the most valuable currency of the World Bank isn’t its money — it is its information.

Created in 1944 and, by custom, headed by an American, the World Bank initially helped finance the reconstruction of war-torn Europe. Since then, it has extended many trillions in loans for a wide variety of projects, be they institutions like schools and hospitals, infrastructure like roads or, controversially, environmentally unfriendly projects like coal-fired power plants and hydroelectric dams. Along the way the World Bank, like the I.M.F., has tinkered with entire economies, sometimes with disastrous results. …

Long regarded as a windowless ivory tower, the World Bank is opening its vast vault of information. True, the bank still lends roughly $170 billion annually. But it is increasingly competing for influence and power with Wall Street, national governments and smaller regional development banks, who have as much or more money to offer. It is no longer the only game in town.

via World Bank Is Opening Its Treasure Chest of Data – NYTimes.com.