World Bank

On Monday a department of World Bank said that it would assign nearly $1 billion for insurance coverage for countries in the Middle East and North Africa to encourage foreign direct investment.

Underwriters of the Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency, or MIGA, visited Egypt, Jordan, Morocco and Tunisia for discussions with the private sector, regional agencies and state-owned enterprises.

A severe cyberattack hit the servers of the International Monetary Fund. The fund has admitted to being a victim of hackers’ hijacking. After the report the World Bank decided to temporally cut all computer connections between the two institutions.

It was not revealed what the nature of the attack was. The IMF staff was told of the hack last week in an email. However, it is widely believed that the attack had occurred some time before Dominique Strauss-Kahn was accused of the sexual assault.

Speculations surface media resources that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had discussions with the White House to leave her job next year to take the position of the World Bank President.

Earlier Clinton said she had no plans to stay at the State Department for more than 4 years. Rumors say Clinton expressed her interest in having the World Bank job if Robert Zoellick, current head of the bank, would leave his post in the middle of 2012.

"Hillary Clinton wants the job," said one source who knows the secretary well.

According to French Finance Minister Chrisitine Lagarde this time G20 meeting will be focused on discussing of global economic imbalances and food inflation. It is the first meeting of G20 this year which will behold today in Paris and last for 2 days. The previous summit was held last November in Seoul and addressed currency and trade imbalances.

One of the largest money remitting services MoneyGram  has announced expansion of its presence in Asia by adding 4,200 new locations to its network in India through Bank of Baroda, Axis Bank and Vijaya Bank. Currently MoneyGram operates through in India over 30,000 locations.

Robert Zoellick, the president of World Bank, said that top economies should consider readopting a modified global gold standard to guide currency movements.

Talking to the Financial Times Zoellick said a "Bretton Woods II" system of floating currencies is needed to replace the Bretton Woods fixed-exchange rate regime that broke down in the early 1970s.

Zoellick called for a system that "is likely to need to involve the dollar, the euro, the yen, the pound and (yuan) that moves toward internationalization and then an open capital account."

The top global financial organizations warned that the current approach adopted by world nations to protect their economies and weaken cooperation may lead to the replication of the previous mistakes and their consequences. World leaders must defuse currency tensions before they worsen to avoid repeating the mistakes of the Great Depression, the head of the World Bank said.

Excess liquidity in global markets is driving up prices of farm commodities, which could be potentially dangerous in the near term, World Bank President Robert Zoellick said on Friday.

 With global interest rates at historic lows, investors are piling into different markets and asset classes in search of higher returns, raising concerns about possible asset bubbles.

According to the World Bank report published in Wednesday's Financial Times, swift interest rate hikes targeted at containing inflation in product and asset prices could lead to another recession in US and European countries, economies of which are recovering slowly. 

 Robert Zoellick, World Bank President, warned the United States that the dollar’s position as a reserve currency should not be taken for granted as there are other options emerging on the world scene. Zoellick said global economic forces were shifting and it was time now to prepare for the fact that growth will come from multiple sources.

"The United States would be mistaken to take for granted the dollar's place as the world's predominant reserve currency," he said. "Looking forward, there will increasingly be other options."