Kristalina Georgieva

Kristalina Georgieva        (deep state operative?)
File:Kristalina Georgieva.jpg
Born	Kristalina Ivanova Georgieva 1953-08-13 Sofia, Bulgaria
Alma mater	University of National and World Economy
Children	1
Spouse	Kino Kinov
Member of	Atlantic Council/Distinguished Leadership Awards, European Council on Foreign Relations, WEF/Board of Trustees
Party	Citizens for European Development
Bilderberg World Bank  Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund In office 1 October 2019 - Present Preceded by Christine Lagarde  Acting World Bank/President  In office 1 February 2019 - 8 April 2019 Preceded by Jim Yong Kim Succeeded by David Malpass  World Bank/CEO In office 2 January 2017 - 1 October 2019  European Commissioner for the Budget and Human Resources  In office 1 November 2014 - 31 December 2016  European Commissioner for International Cooperation Humanitarian Aid and Crisis Response  In office 9 February 2010 - 1 November 2014 Succeeded by Christos Stylianides

Kristalina Georgieva (born 13 August 1953) is a Bulgarian economist, who is the managing director of the International Monetary Fund. She worked as chief executive of the World Bank from January 2017 to 1 October 2019. She served as Acting President of the World Bank from 1 February 2019 to 8 April 2019. She previously served as Vice-President of the European Commission under Jean-Claude Juncker from 2014 to 2016.

On 29 September 2019, Krystalina Georgieva was named the next managing director of the International Monetary Fund. She was the only nominee for the job and is a first person from an emerging country to hold this office.

World Bank

From 1993 to 2010, she served in a number of positions in the World Bank, eventually rising to become its vice president and corporate secretary in March 2008. She has also served as a member of the board of trustee and associated professor in the economics department of the University of National and World Economy in Bulgaria.

On 28 October 2016, the World Bank announced that Georgieva would become the first CEO of the bank starting on 2 January 2017.

United Nations

On 27 September 2016, the Bulgarian government nominated Kristalina Georgieva for the post of United Nations Secretary-General. Her short run secretary-general at the UN ended following a vote at the UN Security Council on 5 October, where Georgieva ranked number eight out of ten candidates. In the same vote, António Guterres got the support of the Security Council for the post of UN Secretary-General.

Krystalina Georgieva was named "European of the Year" in 2010 and "EU Commissioner of the Year" as an acknowledgment of her work, in particular, her handling of the humanitarian disasters in Haiti and Pakistan.

Whales versus Trees

Kristalina Georgieva is very keen to talk about the research one of her International Monetary Fund economists is doing. Surprisingly, this is not about any of the issues that have gripped the organisation in the past 75 years: balance of payments crises or global recessions. It is about whales and the part they play in the fight against climate change:

“Whales act like giant pumps,” says Georgieva, noting that in its lifetime each of these mammals sequesters 33 tonnes of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, while an average tree absorbs about 20kg a year.

Climate change

Comments like this from the new managing director of the IMF have seen her getting some stick since she took over as managing director from Christine Lagarde at the start of October. With the world economy slowing and another financial crash looming, some who attended the IMF’s annual meeting in October said in private that Georgieva was spending too much time on climate change and not enough on the institution’s bread and butter: maintaining financial stability and helping countries in economic trouble.

Georgieva is unrepentant. The climate crisis and financial stability are linked, she says, because if left unattended, global heating will threaten financial stability: :“When people say we should be sticking to our mandate, I fully agree,” she says. “That’s exactly what we are doing.”

Asked which she sees as the bigger risk, another global crash or global heating, she replies:

“Climate change is an existential threat. It is a risk that we all have to take very seriously because from the perspective of an institution that deals with economic matters, it can push back development. We have seen that repeatedly over recent years.”

She is speaking before a meeting of COP25, the UN climate change summit in Madrid this week that will monitor progress towards meeting the carbon-reduction pledges made in Paris four years ago.

Georgieva, who was number two at the World Bank before getting the top job at the IMF, says it makes sense for her organisation to play a prominent role in the fight to prevent temperatures rising to catastrophic levels, and insists the crisis is an opportunity as well as a threat:

“In a world that’s eager for higher growth, this is an opportunity to accelerate investment in low-carbon technologies and speed up the transition to a low-carbon world.”

The industrial revolution was the start of a period that led to tremendous improvement in the people’s lives, but at a cost, she went on:

“The law of unintended consequences means it has created problems, but they are problems we can solve.”

Many environmentalists see a contradiction between the IMF’s pursuit of growth and its new mission to tackle climate change. Georgieva disagrees:

“These things are not necessarily against each other. You can have growth and it can be clean, green, sustainable and equitable.”

She says her message to the COP 25 is simple:

“We all recognise the risks. Now is the time to concentrate on action.”

Georgieva says the IMF is looking at two specific areas where it thinks it has a role to play: tax and spending policy, and making the financial sector more resilient to global heating.

On the fiscal side, the fund is pushing for a carbon tax that would reflect the damage burning fossil fuels causes to the planet. This is currently levied at an average rate of $2 a tonne; the IMF thinks it should be increased to $75 a tonne by 2030.

Georgieva recognises that this might present difficulties in the current political environment, with protests against higher fuel prices in both developed and developing countries:

“A carbon tax will push up prices, and therefore you have to identify who will be vulnerable in advance – not after the tax hits. You have to give people certainty that they are not going to be negatively impacted, and that you are not going to create a poverty or inequality problem by tackling a climate problem.”

The IMF is working in three areas of financial sector reform: tougher standards so that banks and other institutions have to come clean about their exposure to climate risks; action by central banks to stress-test the financial system; and building on work by the insurance industry to put a price on climate risk:

“We need to accelerate action. We need to recognise that the impact of climate change is not just already visible, but tends to hit the world’s poorest countries and poorest people hardest.”

Countries that have actually done very little to cause the problem are the ones most affected, she says, citing the Sahel, the Horn of Africa, Yemen, the Caribbean and small states in the Pacific Ocean:

“They have done virtually nothing to create the problem and yet are the most impacted. On their own they can’t slow climate change, which is why the world needs to work collectively. The reality for those already affected is the reality for the rest of us tomorrow.”

Despite already toxic levels of pollution in China, a recent study showed that the country had installed five times as much energy capacity from coal over the past 18 months as had been mothballed by the rest of the world in the same period. Georgieva says India and China – the two biggest emerging economies – know that they need to make the transition to renewable energy.

But she has a warning for the IMF’s members:

“Countries need to recognise that we are running out of that most precious commodity – time.”

 

Events Participated in

Event	Start	End	Location(s)	Description
Bilderberg/2016	9 June 2016	12 June 2016	Germany Dresden	The 2016 Bilderberg meeting took place in Dresden, Germany.
Brussels Forum/2012	23 March 2012	24 March 2012	Belgium Brussels	Yearly discreet get-together of huge amount of transatlantic politicians, media and military and corporations, under the auspices of the CIA-close German Marshall Fund.
Brussels Forum/2013			Belgium Brussels	Yearly discreet get-together of huge amount of transatlantic politicians, media and military and corporations, under the auspices of the CIA-close German Marshall Fund.
Brussels Forum/2014	21 March 2014	24 March 2014	Belgium Brussels	Yearly discreet get-together of huge amount of transatlantic politicians, media and military and corporations, under the auspices of the CIA-close German Marshall Fund. The theme in 2014 was A World in Transition
Brussels Forum/2015	20 March 2015	22 March 2015	Germany North Rhine-Westphalia Cleve	Yearly discreet get-together of huge amount of transatlantic politicians, media and military and corporations, under the auspices of the CIA-close German Marshall Fund. The 2015 main theme was (R)evolution.
Brussels Forum/2018	8 March 2018	10 March 2018	Belgium Brussels	Annual 3 day spooky get-together of transatlantic politicians, media and military and corporations, under the auspices of the CIA and German Marshall Fund. Discussed the "Fight for Economic Equality".
Munich Security Conference/2012	3 February 2012	5 February 2012	Germany Munich Bavaria	The 48th Munich Security Conference
Munich Security Conference/2019	15 February 2019	17 February 2019	Germany Munich Bavaria	The 55th Munich Security Conference, which included "A Spreading Plague" aimed at "identifying gaps and making recommendations to improve the global system for responding to deliberate, high consequence biological events."
Munich Security Conference/2020	14 February 2020	16 February 2020	Germany Munich Bavaria	The 56th Munich Security Conference, in 2020, "welcomed an unprecedented number of high-ranking international decision-makers."
Munich Security Conference/2022	18 February 2022	20 February 2022	Germany Munich Bavaria	Slightly less than 1/3 of the 664 of the participants have pages here
Munich Security Conference/2023	17 February 2023	19 February 2023	Germany Munich Bavaria	Annual conference of mid-level functionaries from the military-industrial complex - politicians, propagandists and lobbyists. The real decisions are made by deep politicians behind the scenes, elsewhere.
WEF/Annual Meeting/2017	17 January 2017	20 January 2017	World Economic Forum Switzerland	2950 known participants, including prominently Bill Gates. "Offers a platform for the most effective and engaged leaders to achieve common goals for greater societal leadership."
WEF/Annual Meeting/2019	22 January 2019	25 January 2019	World Economic Forum Switzerland	"The reality is that we are in a Cold War [against China] that threatens to turn into a hot one."
WEF/Annual Meeting/2020	21 January 2020	24 January 2020	World Economic Forum Switzerland	This mega-summit of the world's ruling class and their political and media appendages happens every year, but 2020 was special, as the continuous corporate media coverage of COVID-19 started more or less from one day to the next on 20/21 January 2020, coinciding with the start of the meeting.
WEF/Annual Meeting/2023	16 January 2023	20 January 2023	World Economic Forum Switzerland	The theme of the meeting was "Cooperation in a Fragmented World"

Many thanks to our Patrons who cover ~2/3 of our hosting bill. Please join them if you can.