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"Patriots" on Broadway: The story of Putin's rise to power
“Putin was my mistake. Getting rid of him is my responsibility.”
It’s clear by the time the character Boris Berezovsky utters that chilling line in the new Broadway play “Patriots” that any attempt to stop Russian President Vladimir Putin’s rise would be futile, perhaps even fatal.
The show, which opened for a limited run in New York on April 22, stars Tony and Emmy-nominated actor Michael Stuhlbarg as Berezovsky, a larger-than-life oligarch whose billions buy him into the highest ranks of Russian power after the fall of the Soviet Union. When asked by President Boris Yeltsin to find a successor to lead the fledgling nation, Berezovsky taps Putin, a former KGB agent and ex-mayor of St. Petersburg who few knew well.
The play’s director, Rupert Goold, said while the play is set in a specific moment in modern Russian history, the script has needed changes along the way as major developments colored Putin’s story.
“It does feel like the filter on it changes every day because something else happens every day,” actor Will Keen, who originated the role of Putin in London two years ago, told GZERO’s Tony Maciulis. “It feels like the play has, overall, become darker and darker. It seems to become more and more perturbing.”
“Patriots'' was written by Peter Morgan, creator of Netflix’s “The Crown” and the play puts a similarly-styled lens on Russian history. It’s Shakespearean, more melodrama than history lesson, but the characters are very real. The Broadway audience will also likely receive the show differently than the West End crowd in London, in part because of America’s long and contentious relationship with Russia, and the current polarization in US politics and discourse.
“Patriots” is playing a 12-week run at Broadway’s Barrymore theater.
Catch this full episode of GZERO World with Ian Bremmer on public television beginning this Friday, April 26. Check local listings.
Why the UN's 17 Sustainable Development Goals are not on track to be financed soon
The world faces a sustainable development crisis, and while most countries have strategies in place, they don’t have the cash to back them up. How far off track are we with the financing needed to support the UN’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals, ranging from quality education and health care to climate action and clean water?
Shari Spiegel, who runs the UN’s Financing for Sustainable Development Office, sat down with GZERO’s Tony Maciulis at a Global Stage event for the IMF-World Bank Spring Meetings this week. She explains that the SDGs were off track even before the pandemic and that now, owing to global crises, many poorer countries have slipped backwards.
“We actually started backtracking on many of these goals as countries were under enormous stress, and particularly the poorest countries,” she said, noting that the global output of many of the poorest nations has fallen by 30% — and some, such as the Small Island Developing States, by 40%. This has led to an enormous finance divide — raising SDG financing and investment gaps from $2 trillion a few years ago to around $4 trillion today.
So how can the UN restrengthen multilateralism and, in turn, help narrow this gap? Watch here.
For more of our 2024 IMF/World Bank Spring Meetings coverage, visit Global Stage.
Are markets becoming immune to disruptive geopolitics?
There’s no escaping the intricate link between economics and geopolitics. Today, that link has become a crucial factor in investment decision-making, and who better to speak to that than Margaret Franklin, CEO of CFA Institute, a global organization of investment professionals? Franklin sat down with GZERO’s Tony Maciulis at a Global Stage event for the IMF-World Bank spring meetings this week.
Economists once predicted that sovereign debt would overwhelm global markets. But now, having been through the pandemic, the advent of AI, and wars in the Middle East and Ukraine, “there's almost a level of immunity,” she says, “to the dramatic nature of it until something really cataclysmic happens.”
And then? “The response, generally speaking, has been pretty positive,” Franklin says, with central bank intervention saving markets and building resilience.
In much the same way, the World Bank is trying to boost investor confidence by making changes that leverage private sector capital for public sector goals by better evaluating what level of risk the private sector will accept.
Individual investors should do the same, Franklin advises. “Really evaluate your risk profile … making sure you diversify,” she says, noting that fixed-income offerings have become more attractive. Younger investors, meanwhile, need to be cautious with getting their information on social media, she adds.
For more of our 2024 IMF/World Bank Spring Meetings coverage, visit Global Stage.
Why Africa's power partnership with the World Bank should attract investors
There’s a word frequently used at global convenings like the World Bank Group’s Spring Meetings held this week in Washington, D.C.—multistakeholder. It refers to an approach to problem solving that involves input from a wide range of players—governments, civil society, private sector corporations and investors.
It will take a multistakeholder approach to bring an ambitious new project announced Wednesday to fruition, an initiative to provide electricity to 300 million people in Africa by 2030.
Of the world’s nearly 800 million people living without power, an estimated 570 million are in Sub-Saharan Africa, according to the World Bank. The organization is partnering with the African Development Bank and its own International Development Association to provide up to $30 billion in funding, but is also banking on private sector investment to help make this plan a reality.
At the meetings this week, GZERO’s Tony Maciulis spoke to Lucy Heintz, Head of Energy Infrastructure at Actis Energy Fund, a global investment company focused on sustainability. Heintz expressed optimism in the announcement and explained the reasons why it could be attractive to investors.
“This is a great ambition and it's a huge plan,” Heintz said. “If it's met on the other side by a real intent to do business by government, wherever those governments may be, in those countries where energy access is still lacking, then I think you can start to see the pieces fall into place.”
Heintz explained there are already tools in place that mitigate risk for cross-border private investors, such as the Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency (MIGA), a World Bank organization that provides insurance for noncommercial political and economic risk.
Success stories already exist globally, Heintz explained, with India being a prime example.
“India has put in place the right legislative frameworks, the right regulation,” she said. “It's also invested in the enabling environment. So, there's a very successful transmission grid investment program, which is led by the government, but then brings in private sector once those projects are de-risked.”
As for concerns about carbon emissions and environmental risk from expanding electricity generation, Heintz says there is a greater danger in not bringing more people to power.
“Reliable electricity supply is fundamental if you want to have any ability to mitigate the risks of climate change, whether it's refrigeration, cooling, the ability to earn a livelihood, it's fundamental,” she said. “I think that's the most important thing to have in mind.”
For more of our 2024 IMF/World Bank Spring Meetings coverage, visit Global Stage.
How to tackle global challenges: The IMF & World Bank blueprint
The International Monetary Fund and World Bank’s Spring Meetings in Washington have told a tale of two economies: In the developed world, inflation is falling, and recession looks unlikely. But many of the world’s poorest countries are struggling under tremendous debt burdens inflated by rising interest rates that threaten to undo decades of development progress. That means these key lenders of last resort have their work cut out for them.
The good news? There’s a proven model, as GZERO Senior Writer Matthew Kendrick discussed with Tony Maciulis at a Global Stage event while reporting on the meetings. Somalia, once the byword for a failed state, managed to implement massive reforms to its financial system to meet the guidelines of the IMF’s Highly Indebted Poor Countries Initiative.
“Because they met those guidelines — while still in a very fragile environment where they were fighting Islamic extremists in the country, dealing with semi-autonomous zones in the north — they managed to discharge 90% of their debt,” said Kendrick. “It's proof that even in very fragile countries, if, as the Somali finance minister said yesterday, you build these projects into nationally unifying efforts to build a better future, they can have tremendous success.”
Kendrick also cited comments from experts calling for the IMF and World Bank to change how they view humanitarian work more generally and not back away from countries amid war. “Conflicts are becoming a day-to-day part of our lives all over the world,” he says. “That means that the IMF and World Bank, in order to make progress on development, have to figure out ways to work with the institutions in these countries as they are also in conflict.”
For more of our 2024 IMF/World Bank Spring Meetings coverage, visit Glogal Stage.
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World Bank announces plan to bring power to 300 million in Africa
World Bank Group is bringing power to the people. Literally.
This week, during the bank’s annual Spring Meetings, the group announced a major new initiative to provide electricity to 300 million Africans by 2030. It is estimated that nearly 800 million people globally lack access to power, and the vast majority of them, 600 million, live on the African continent.
GZERO’s Tony Maciulis met with the World Bank’s Director of Infrastructure for West Africa Franz Drees-Gross, to discuss the project's details.
Over the next six years, the World Bank aims to connect 250 million people using $30 billion of public sector funding largely drawn from its International Development Association. The development finance institution provides low-interest loans and grants to the poorest countries. The group has also partnered with the African Development Bank, which has committed to supporting an additional 50 million people.
The connectivity will come from a combination of sources, some existing and some to be created by the project.
“It turns out that the most cost-effective way to connect those 250 million people is to connect about half of them using off-grid solutions,” Drees-Gross said. “So that means solar home systems, it means mini-grids that aren't connected to the larger national grid, and the other half of that goal will have to be connected by grid extensions and grid densifications.”
The ambitious plan comes with challenges including fortifying and modernizing existing utility companies to be able to consistently provide power and collect customer payments.
“The problem in many Sub-Saharan African countries is that utilities aren't recovering their costs,” Drees-Gross said. “They lose 30, 40, sometimes 50% of electricity due to commercial and technical losses. Since they only invoice a fraction of what they buy from the generators and then fail to collect that entire amount, that leads to a deficit.”
That inconsistent business has made the utilities less attractive to private-sector investors. World Bank hopes its support in stabilizing the power industry in the region will be an opportunity that will bring in private investment, ultimately powering the growth of more economies in Africa.
For more of our 2024 IMF/World Bank Spring Meetings coverage, visit Glogal Stage.
Half the world can’t access healthcare. How can the World Bank help?
Billions of individual tragedies come together to hold back development in some of the world's most fragile countries, and that’s where the World Bank has a role to play. Monique Vledder runs the Global Health Practice at the World Bank, and she sat down with GZERO’s Tony Maciulis at a Global Stage event for the institution’s annual Spring Meetings.GZERO’s Tony Maciulis met with the World Bank’s Director of Infrastructure for West Africa Franz Drees-Gross, to discuss the project's details.
She announced ambitious goals to start tackling the problem: “We are planning to reach, with our financing and our programs, 1.5 billion people over the next five years with quality health services,” she says, expanding the World Bank’s geographic footprint in healthcare to target vulnerable countries and build capacity in their healthcare systems.
For more of our 2024 IMF/World Bank Spring Meetings coverage, visit Glogal Stage.
World Bank economist: The poorest are getting poorer globally
It’s a staggering statistic and a marked setback from the years before the COVID-19 pandemic—the world’s poorest countries are falling further behind, and the wealth gap between the least and most developed nations is growing. One in three of these countries is poorer today than in 2019.
Ayhan Kose, World Bank Group’s Deputy Chief Economist, said that the combined shocks of multiple crises, including the pandemic, wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, food insecurity, and inflation, have taken a massive toll on the 75 least developed economies.
Kose spoke to GZERO’s Tony Maciulis as the annual Spring Meetings of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund were underway this week in Washington, DC.
“When the food price goes up, the price of oil goes up. That has significant implications for these economies,” he told GZERO. “Where we are now, when you look at 2020-24, they registered the weakest growth rate on average since the 1990s.”
In many ways, the global economic outlook presented this week tells a tale of two post-pandemic realities. Kose explained that the most developed nations, particularly the US, showed greater resilience than expected early in 2023, and the threat of recession has been kept at bay. However, the negative impacts on poor countries, many of which are in Sub-Saharan Africa, cannot be ignored and could lead to greater geopolitical risk and humanitarian emergencies.
This week, World Bank leaders are calling for a renewed commitment to the International Development Association (IDA), which provides zero-interest loans and grants to nations most in need. Kose said the risk associated with crippling sovereign debt has caused some private sector funding to dry up and that politics and protectionism are impacting how wealthier nations approach funding.
But he also pointed to enormous opportunity in nations that are IDA-funded, including a younger population that could serve as a future global workforce and rich natural resources.
With proper investment and funding, he explained, other developing countries have been lifted to find sustained growth.
“At the end of the day history is full of examples. China, India, Indonesia, Chile, (South) Korea. They all used to be IDA borrowers. They were poorer countries. They became much richer.”
For more of our 2024 IMF/World Bank Spring Meetings coverage, visit Glogal Stage.
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