David Malpass Quotes
The world is constantly in a race to the top, in terms of there's a limited amount of capital and you've got to figure where it's going. And if your currency is weakening, that means you're paying a load.
Malpass, David. Interview. Bloomberg Surveillance, Bloomberg Television, 2013.
FDR was then a candidate for the Democratic Vice Presidential Nomination. This statement shocked some of the conservative French and British delegates and officials such as Ramsay MacDonald, Georges Bonnet, and Neville Chamberlain, but economist John Maynard Keynes strongly approved of Roosevelt Roosevelt’s statements. At issue was whether or not the major currency powers should confer frequently and set the international currency exchange rates or should the rates float and be determined at any point by the free market in currency. FDR held the latter view which was opposed to the positions of the conservative banker-oriented delegates from the European counties, However Roosevelt’s statement was considered “harsh” and “vituperative” by the conservatives and the entire conference collapsed over them. FDR admitted that perhaps he had been too strong and blunt in his language. An irony of this quotation is that 80 years later the positions of liberals and conservatives had both flip-flopped. It became the conservatives who adopted the FDR free market for currency exchange while many liberals called for government intervention and agreement on exchange rates to prevent instability.
David Robert Malpass is an American economic analyst and former government official serving as President of the World Bank Group since 2019. Malpass previously served as Under Secretary of the Treasury for International Affairs under Donald Trump, Deputy Assistant Treasury Secretary under Ronald Reagan, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State under George H. W. Bush. He served as Chief Economist at Bear Stearns for the six years preceding its collapse.
