“We are one shock away from a full-blown crisis.” Robert Zoellick, World Bank President

The World bank is run by the United States, and if the current situation within the U.S. is any sign, then the world economy, influenced by the World Bank, is in trouble.

The International Monetary Fund is worried as well: “Especially because of youth unemployment… there is now a risk that this will be turned into a life sentence, and that there is a possibility of a lost generation.”-Dominique Strauss-Kahn, IMF chief

One analyst says fiscal and monetary policies might actually make things worse: “What they do is they very often pressure government to adopt what we call pro-cyclical policies. The economy’s weak and in recession, they want them to cut spending or raise taxes. And that can be very dangerous, I mean you can slip back into recession, you can make a recession worse.”- Mark Weisbrot, Center for Economic and Policy Research

Officials with the World Bank, and the IMF, say food prices, citizen security, justice and jobs, are the main issues for international economic stability.  Yet history shows that the policies of the IMF and World Bank actually cause some of the problems: “The International Monetary Fund and the World Bank say that they are interested in reducing poverty. All their actions however said otherwise. Their actions have instead raised the poverty level and created under-development.”-Andrew Garvin Marshall, Center for Research on Globalization

The president of the World Bank has always been a United States citizen, since 1944.