FINANCIAL VACCINES: “OBSCENE” PANDEMIC INSURANCE BONDS ISSUED SINCE 2017 BY WORLD BANK AND WHO, WITH NO INTENT TO PAY OR HELP
Thu 9:27 am +01:00, 8 Apr 2021
Remember Silverstein, the dude who cashed some billions insurance for the WTC towers that fell on 9/11?
I’ve often likened that event and the Plandemic and guess what: the Plandemic has its own Silversteins. Possibly same ones at the top of the tops.
About a year ago I wrote a big expose on how the banksters and the mob that gravitate around the World Bank set up the current world order and the Plandemic. I’m afraid you have to start there, no way around it if you want to get the big picture.
Also read: (1ST ANNIVERSARY SPECIAL) SOROS A ROTHSCHILD FRONTMAN, FORGED IMF-CHINA ALLIANCE. WE’RE LIVING THE CONSEQUENCES
I’ve never stopped adding evidence since and it’s overflowing. This new piece deserves its own feature.
May 2016 – The World Bank announces the creation of the Pandemic Emergency Financing Facility (PEF)
The event took place at the G7 Finance Ministers and Central Governors meeting in Sendai, Japan. The PEF is a scheme to channel funding to countries facing a major disease outbreak with pandemic potential.
2017 – The creation of the Global Preparedness Monitoring Board
The Global Preparedness Monitoring Board (GPMB) is an independent monitoring and accountability body co-convened by the World Bank and World Health Organization, created in response to recommendations by the UN Secretary General’s Global Health Crises Task Force in 2017.
Despite progress made since the West Africa Ebola crisis in 2014/15, GPMB’s 2019 report, A World At Risk noted an increasingly dire risk of widespread epidemics, and found that the world remained unprepared. GPMB warned that epidemic-prone diseases like Ebola, influenza and SARS were increasingly difficult to manage in the face of prolonged conflict, fragile states, and forced migration.
June 2017 – World Bank Launches First-Ever Pandemic Bonds to Support $500 Million Pandemic Emergency Financing Facility
Washington, DC, June 28, 2017 – The World Bank (International Bank for Reconstruction and Development) today launched specialized bonds aimed at providing financial support to the Pandemic Emergency Financing Facility (PEF), a facility created by the World Bank to channel surge funding to developing countries facing the risk of a pandemic.
This marks the first time that World Bank bonds are being used to finance efforts against infectious diseases, and the first time that pandemic risk in low-income countries is being transferred to the financial markets.
The PEF will provide more than $500 million to cover developing countries against the risk of pandemic outbreaks over the next five years, through a combination of bonds and derivatives priced today, a cash window, and future commitments from donor countries for additional coverage.
The transaction, that enables PEF to potentially save millions of lives, was oversubscribed by 200% reflecting an overwhelmingly positive reception from investors and a high level of confidence in the new World Bank sponsored instrument. With such strong demand, the World Bank was able to price the transaction well below the original guidance from the market. The total amount of risk transferred to the market through the bonds and derivatives is $425 million.
“With this new facility, we have taken a momentous step that has the potential to save millions of lives and entire economies from one of the greatest systemic threats we face,” World Bank Group President Jim Yong Kim said. “We are moving away from the cycle of panic and neglect that has characterized so much of our approach to pandemics. We are leveraging our capital market expertise, our deep understanding of the health sector, our experience overcoming development challenges, and our strong relationships with donors and the insurance industry to serve the world’s poorest people. This creates an entirely new market for pandemic risk insurance. Drawing on lessons from the Ebola Outbreak in West Africa, the Facility will help improve health security for everyone. I especially want to thank the World Health Organization and the governments of Japan and Germany for their support in launching this new mechanism.”
The World Bank announced the creation of the PEF in May 2016 at the G7 Finance Ministers and Central Governors meeting in Sendai, Japan. The PEF will quickly channel funding to countries facing a major disease outbreak with pandemic potential. Its unique financing structure combines funding from the bonds issued today with over-the-counter derivatives that transfer pandemic outbreak risk to derivative counterparties. The structure was designed to attract a wider, more diverse set of investors.
The PEF has two windows. The first is an ‘insurance’ window with premiums funded by Japan and Germany, consisting of bonds and swaps including those executed today. The second is a ‘cash’ window, for which Germany provided initial funding of Euro 50 million. The cash window will be available from 2018 for the containment of diseases that may not be eligible for funding under the insurance window.
The bonds and derivatives for the PEF’s ‘insurance’ window were developed by the World Bank Treasury in cooperation with leading reinsurance companies Swiss Re and Munich Re. AIR Worldwide was the sole modeler, using the AIR Pandemic Model to provide expert risk analysis. Swiss Re Capital Markets is the sole book runner for the transaction. Swiss Re Capital Markets and Munich Re are the joint structuring agents. Munich Re and GC Securities, a division of MMC Securities LLC are co-managers.
Swiss Re Capital Markets Limited, Munich Re and GC Securities were also joint arrangers on the derivatives transactions.
The bonds will be issued under IBRD’s “capital at risk” program because investors bear the risk of losing part or all of their investment in the bond if an epidemic event triggers pay-outs to eligible countries covered under the PEF.
The PEF covers six viruses that are most likely to cause a pandemic. These include new Orthomyxoviruses (new influenza pandemic virus A), Coronaviridae (SARS, MERS), Filoviridae (Ebola, Marburg) and other zoonotic diseases (Crimean Congo, Rift Valley, Lassa fever).
PEF financing to eligible countries will be triggered when an outbreak reaches predetermined levels of contagion, including number of deaths; the speed of the spread of the disease; and whether the disease crosses international borders.
The determinations for the trigger are made based on publicly available data as reported by the World Health Organization (WHO).
Countries eligible for financing under the PEF’s insurance window are members of the International Development Association (IDA), the institution of the World Bank Group that provides concessional finance for the world’s poorest countries. The PEF will be governed by a Steering Body, whose voting members include Japan and Germany. WHO and the World Bank serve as non-voting members.
The World Bank has developed some of the most innovative catastrophe risk insurance instruments in the market to help developing countries manage risk. In the past ten years the institution has executed approximately $1.6 billion in catastrophe risk transactions.
| IBRD Pandemic Bonds Distribution by Investor Type and Location | ||
| Distribution by Investor Type | Class A | Class B |
| Dedicated Catastrophe Bond Investor | 61.7% | 35.3% |
| Endowment | 3.3% | 6.3% |
| Asset Manager | 20.6% | 16.3% |
| Pension Fund | 14.4% | 42.1% |
| Distribution by Investor Location | Class A | Class B |
| US | 27.9% | 15.0% |
| Europe | 71.8% | 82.9% |
| Bermuda | 0.1% | 2.1% |
| Japan | 0.2% | 0.0% |
| IBRD Pandemic Bonds Summary Terms and Conditions* | ||
| Type of Note | Class A | Class B |
| Issuer: | International Bank for Reconstruction and Development | International Bank for Reconstruction and Development |
| Trade Date: | June 28, 2017 | June 28, 2017 |
| Final Size (Bond only)** | USD 225 million | USD 95 million |
| Settlement Date: | July 7, 2017 | July 7, 2017 |
| Scheduled Maturity Date: | July 15, 2020 extendable monthly in whole or in part, up to a maximum of 12 months following the Scheduled Maturity Date | July 15, 2020 extendable monthly in whole or in part, up to a maximum of 12 months following the Scheduled Maturity Date |
| Issue Price: | 100% | 100% |
| Bond Coupon: | 6m USD LIBOR +6.50% | 6m USD LIBOR +11.10% |
| Covered Perils: | Flu, Coronavirus | Filovirus, Coronavirus, Lassa Fever, Rift Valley Fever and Crimean Congo Hemorrhagic Fever |
| Redemption Amount: | The Notes will not be fully repaid if an event occurs | The Notes will not be fully repaid if an event occurs |
(*) Please see the Supplemental Prospectus for a detailed description of the Terms and Conditions of the bonds, the related risks with regard to an investment in the bonds and the relevant offering restrictions. Any offer of the bonds will solely take place on the basis of the Supplemental Prospectus prepared by the World Bank or on behalf of the World Bank.
(**) There was an additional $105 million size done in the derivatives market.
Our take out from this?
Remember the strange numbers reported during the first “casedemic of 2020”? They determined how much money WB pays and to whom.
But WB and the funky bunch are also behind WHO, so it’s safe to say controlled the situation at all times and could arbitrarily decide whatever.
WORLD BANK SAYS COVID-19 TEST KITS ARE BEING SOLD SINCE 2017
2018 – World Bank Group’s Pandemic Emergency Financing Facility (PEF) Welcomes Australia as New Donor
WASHINGTON, JUNE 21, 2018 — The World Bank Group’s Pandemic Emergency Financing Facility (PEF) welcomes Australia as a donor to the PEF, joining Japan and Germany. Australia is contributing US$7.2 million to the PEF’s Cash Window, which was set up through an initial contribution from Germany. Australia will also now be a voting member of the PEF Steering Body.
“With this contribution to the PEF, Australia is supporting the scaling up of national and international responses to infectious disease outbreaks,” said the Hon Julie Bishop MP, Minister for Foreign Affairs, Australia. “We are committed to working with international partners to reduce the risk of global pandemics and improve health security for all.”
“The PEF ensures that we break the cycle of panic and neglect which has so far characterized the global approach to pandemics,” said Annette Dixon, Vice President, Human Development at the World Bank Group. “It is a key example of the World Bank Group’s commitment to creating innovative financing mechanisms to tackle complex global challenges, working with country governments, donors, international partners and the private sector.”
“The robust and swift contribution of the PEF just in the past week has underlined its role as a new model for financing pandemic response with speed and flexibility,” said Mukesh Chawla, Coordinator of the PEF and Advisor, World Bank Group. “It ensures that money is never the reason holding back effective response.”
The PEF, set up by the World Bank Group in partnership with Japan, Germany, the World Health Organization (WHO), and private sector partners, has been operational since July 2017 and consists of both a cash and an insurance component. The PEF’s $425 million Insurance Window with premiums funded by Japan and Germany, consists of bonds placed on the capital markets. This would be triggered if a much larger, multi-country response is needed. All activation criteria are based upon publicly available data provided by the WHO. The PEF covers 78 of the world’s poorest countries against pandemic threats and is the first mechanism to be expressly designed for this purpose.
May 2019 – updates on Pandemic Emergency Financing Facility
Click here to zoom in.
The Pandemic Emergency Financing Facility (PEF) – a financing mechanism housed at the World Bank – is designed to provide an additional source of financing to help the world’s poorest countries respond to cross-border, large-scale outbreaks. The PEF complements the much larger role that IDA, the World Bank’s fund for the poorest countries, and other international organizations and donors play in financing outbreak response. The PEF’s design is unique in that payments can go directly to governments and pre-approved frontline responder organizations (such as WHO & UNICEF) and it can do so through either its cash window — or once triggered through its insurance window.
Pandemic Emergency Financing Facility (PEF) Framework
PEF Brochure | Spanish | French | Russian
February 2020 – Is the whole thing is designed to fail?
The Street does a really good job at explaining the scheme:
“In June 2017, the World Bank — the international financial institution that provides loans to poorer countries — sold around $425 million (€391 million) worth of bonds and derivatives aimed at providing financial support to developing countries facing the risk of a pandemic.The less risky tranche of the bonds will not be paid back to investors if there are more than 2,500 deaths in developing countries as a result of a pandemic. Although China has recorded more than this number of deaths, the World Bank does not designate it a developing country.
By far the riskier of the two bonds is “Class B,” which sold $95 million in bonds (compared to $225 million for the less risky “Class A,” explained above). For Class B, if the disease crosses an international border and if there are at least 20 deaths in that second country, the investors’ money will be paid to developing countries dealing with the outbreak.
I do not come up with $425 million total. $225 million plus $95 million does not total $425 million.
Only those class B bonds are going to trigger.
An international crisis is brewing. There are 19 deaths in Iran, 12 in Italy, and 12 in South Korea.
One more death in Iran is all it takes unless there are other restrictions.
Designed to Fail
Bodo Ellmers, the director of the Global Policy Forum’s sustainable development finance program told the Financial Times the instrument was “useless.”
“You obviously want to prevent a pandemic but it only pays out when it becomes a pandemic,” he said.
Olga Jones, who worked as an economist at the World Bank for three decades, said it was absurd that discussions for a second round of bonds for what is known officially as the Pandemic Emergency Financing Facility (PEF) had begun, as they were effectively “designed to fail.”
Many critics have also pointed to the fact that the severe attack of Ebola that hit the Democratic Republic of Congo in 2018 did not meet the conditions to trigger payment of the pandemic bonds despite the fact that almost 500 people died and that it was one of the largest outbreaks ever recorded.
Payout and Maturity
The Class A bonds feature an interest rate of 7% while the Class B bonds’ rate is 11%.
According to the PEF, around $75.5 million had been paid to bondholders in the form of premiums as of August 2019. The full amount paid in interest and coupons has not been disclosed. The bonds are set to mature in July 2020.
Painful Problem
The Wall Street Journal discusses the Painful Problem With Pandemic Bonds
“The idea behind pandemic bonds, issued by the World Bank in 2017, is simple: They pay investors a solid return, but if a pandemic breaks out, the principal is redirected to help low-income countries pay for their emergency response.
An investor who doesn’t do the legwork is liable to get burned when the bonds don’t behave as expected. At 386 pages, the prospectus for the World Bank’s class-B securities isn’t a light read.
The second and larger problem with pandemic bonds is one they don’t share with other catastrophe-related securities. During extreme events, they don’t offer a source of returns uncorrelated with major capital markets—one of the things buyers like most about the asset class.
Pandemic bonds are most likely to be triggered just as equities tumble and concerns about companies’ ability to finance themselves come to the fore, as now. In short, the asset class is uncorrelated with wider markets—except at the exact moment when that matters most. Then it is suddenly very correlated.”
Questions Abound
These bonds pay interest. How does the Wold Bank pay that interest?
Generally, companies issue bonds for expansion and expect to pay the debt back from future profits or current income.
What is the World Bank invested in or doing with the money to pay way above market rates?
Only the $95 million in class B bonds will trigger. But at 11% interest with a maturity date coming up, most of that money has been paid out.
Even if some developing nations do end up receiving pandemic bond money, it will be a trivial sum when compared with the economic damage from a sustained coronavirus pandemic.
Meanwhile the class A bond buyers have been collecting 7% with virtually no chance of losing their money by July of 2020 because China is not a developing nation.
The whole setup makes no sense unless failure was the intent all along.” – The Street
Or, unless it’s designed to not trigger more than conveniently, like electronic poker. – Silview
Intent is the hardest thing to demonstrate in the justice system. Except in this case. WB put years of effort in elaborating a “maze of confusion” when it comes to the bonds’ triggers, to avoid payment, as a former WB expert testifies in the Bloomberg video below. All that effort weighs now as evidence of premeditation. There’s literally a few kilos of evidence available, if printed.
The Guardian got it, but can’t fully say it
World Bank’s $500m pandemic scheme accused of ‘waiting for people to die’
BONDS DESIGNED TO PROVIDE FAST FUNDING FOR POOR COUNTRIES BRANDED ‘OBSCENE’ BECAUSE OF COMPLEX PAYOUT CRITERIA
A flagship $500m World Bank scheme to help the poorest countries deal with a health emergency is “too little too late” for the coronavirus outbreak, say health experts.
The first pandemic emergency financing (PEF) bonds were launched in 2017 by Jim Yong Kim, the bank’s president at the time, after the Ebola outbreak in west Africa. Designed to potentially “save millions of lives and entire economies” by speedily funnelling money to nations facing pandemics.
But critics say the “insanely complicated” terms of the high-interest bonds are heavily skewed towards investors, while for the victims any payouts may come too late, if at all.
One economist described the bonds, payouts from which depend on how deadly the outbreak is, as “obscene”.
Olga Jonas, a senior fellow at Harvard Global Health Institute who was an economist at the World Bank for three decades, said: “The whole mechanism is highly unfortunate. The objectives were to help the poorest countries respond quickly to outbreaks. Infectious disease spreads exponentially and the coronavirus has a very rapid growth rate. But the bonds only get triggered when the disease has spread for a long time.”
Jonas, who has analysed the bonds’ terms, said they were “so convoluted, it is not at all clear whether they will pay out at all. It is too little, too late – and in this case, maybe never.
“What’s obscene is that the World Bank set it up this way. It waits for people to die.”
Funds can only be released after a certain amount of time and in accordance with complex criteria including outbreak size, growth rate, deadlines and death tolls. In the case of coronavirus, the bonds would not pay out until 12 weeks after the World Health Organization (WHO) publishes its first “situation report”, which would not be until 23 March. Another criterion is that the outbreak is still growing.
The bonds, funded by donor nations Japan and Germany, deliver interest payments to investors until the conditions for an infectious disease outbreak are triggered.
The value of the bonds has halved as the coronavirus outbreak has spread, raising fears investors could face losses.
Meanwhile, the WHO has appealed for £520m for “frontline efforts” to contain coronavirus. The disease has infected more than 82,000 people and killed over 2,800 people in 51 countries to date, but has not yet been declared a pandemic by the WHO.
Clare Wenham, assistant professor in global health policy at the London School of Economics, said: “If you really wanted to ensure global health security you would link the payout of the bonds to a decision around declaring a public health emergency of international concern or a national emergency.”
Wenham co-authored a paper criticising pandemic bonds in which it was found that more money was paid out to investors than to countries facing disease outbreaks. Payments would have only been triggered in two out of more than 60 disease outbreaks analysed – Ebola in west Africa and rift valley fever in 2006, the paper found.
Wenham said: “If the aim of it is to prevent pandemics, why would you wait for arbitrary numbers? Global health security is predicated on prevention rather than response, so waiting for it to get to a certain number of deaths in a certain number of countries before they pay out, is counterintuitive. It is not fit for purpose.
“No one has thought about it holistically. If public health officials have made a declaration of a global health emergency of international concern, there should be some mechanism for financing so that the WHO doesn’t have to go around the houses asking for money.”
Bodo Ellmers, director of Global Policy Forum’s sustainable development finance programme, said: “The idea was that it would be a quick instrument, but it was set up with such stringent criteria that the risk for investors is very low. The design, taking the number of dead people as a criteria, is very cynical.”
The scheme’s “fundamental flaw” is that it was aimed at preventing a pandemic but would only pay out when a pandemic was already underway, said Ellmers.
The World Bank said a PEF payout had been triggered after the Ebola outbreak of 2018 and 2019 in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, providing a total of $61.4m to fight the disease.
The bank added that it has rolled out a series of tools to better assist countries during critical outbreaks, epidemics and pandemic threats.
It is capable of fast-tracking funds via existing projects and could fund emergency operations within three months – although in past cases, such as Ebola, it had provided support within two weeks.
Around the same time, February 2020, Washington Examiner doesn’t have the guts to put out such conclusion, but confirms pretty much everything else:
“Investors betting big against catastrophic diseases are watching the World Health Organization closely as insurance bonds tied to whether the organization labels COVID-19 a pandemic are set to mature in June.
In 2017, the World Bank designed a new way to raise money: Pandemic Emergency Financing bonds. Over $425 million worth of such bonds, which bet against a global outbreak of infectious diseases and will default if WHO declares the coronavirus a pandemic, were sold by the World Bank in its first-ever issuance of catastrophe bonds. In the event of no pandemic, investors would be paid a healthy annualized return. Meanwhile, the World Bank could use the bonds to insure itself against the risk of a global outbreak.
“As an investor, we do not want to lose money,” said Chin Liu, a portfolio manager at Amundi Pioneer, a Boston-based firm that purchased the bonds as a way to diversify the company’s $1 billion catastrophe fund. “But then, we also understand if it’s unfortunately triggered, it benefits every single person, including ourselves, to keep the virus controlled.”
For large-scale investors looking for above-average returns in a bloated market, the bonds were the next logical place to hedge against disaster. At the time of issuance, then-World Bank President Jim Yong-Kim heralded the bonds as an opportunity to leverage “capital market expertise to serve the world’s poorest people.”
The bonds were administered in two tranches, with Class A bond investors receiving a return of 6.9% annually. Class B bond investors received 11.5% annually. The World Bank raised $225 million in Class A bonds and $95 million in Class B bonds.
The investors, mainly endowments and pension funds, have long bet against natural disasters such as hurricanes, but the 2017 issuance of the bonds marked a shift in the market. Before, investors were betting on the wind speed of hurricanes, but now, they were betting on the likelihood of an infectious disease that could tear through nations across the globe.
“This marks the first time that World Bank bonds are being used to finance efforts against infectious diseases, and the first time that pandemic risk in low-income countries is being transferred to the financial markets,” read a statement from the World Bank at the time of issuance.
The conditions under which the payout on bonds will default are staggered based on how rapidly the disease spreads, the number of deaths associated with the illness, and whether the virus crosses international borders.
March 2020 -more people start to wake up to the scam.
Jacobin Mag: “Twelve weeks passed on March 23, and death is raining down on countries rich and poor. More than 770,000 cases of coronavirus have been reported worldwide, and in some places, infections and deaths are doubling every few days. Yet the World Bank says that eligible countries — so far Afghanistan, Pakistan, Nigeria, Cambodia, Senegal, and Nepal — won’t know if they will get any money until April 9 at the earliest.
This is despicable. Even wealthy countries are failing to contain the deadly virus. Poor countries that, for centuries, have seen their wealth and resources pilfered and plundered by rich nations, are facing down a tidal wave of infection and death without adequate medical supplies and facilities. Millions of people in these countries have compromised immune systems due to malnutrition, live in housing and communities that make social distancing impossible, and lack even the most basic necessities of disease prevention, such as access to water and soap for handwashing.
However, in this moment of crisis, when every second counts, global capital is sitting on its hands, holding desperately needed funds hostage as investors decide whether they are required to honor their end of the deal.
The pandemic bonds were advertised by the World Bank as a great way to “tackle social ills through private investment.” Instead, the bonds are yet another example of how hollow most so-called ESG investment is. They demonstrate how private investors have an uncanny ability to profit from social ills — and how, even in times when global solidarity is desperately needed, global capital can’t seem to look past the bottom line.”
APRIL 2020 – THE WORLD IS SCANDALIZED, THE WORLD BANK ACCEPTS TO PAY A LITTLE OVER HALF THE MONEY
The beginning of the month sees surprising attacks on WB, even from usual allies, who probably have to think of their media reputation before WB’s
So, finally, on April 20, 2020, WB makes the big announcement:
“All activation criteria including outbreak size, spread and growth have been met,” the World Bank said in an update on its website, referring to the coronavirus outbreak, adding PEF bonds and swaps were expected to pay out $195.84 million. (Out of 322 milion – S.m)
A steering body will now meet to determine how to allocate the funds to so-called IDA countries – a group of 76 of the world’s poorest nations, the World Bank said. The committee is made up of Australia, Germany, Japan, the World Health Organization, UNICEF, the World Bank, and two IDA countries – currently Haiti and Liberia…
Campaigners have also been critical of the complex structure of the instrument, which requires five variables on the number of deaths, the velocity of its spread and its geographical spread to be reached before paying out.
This had been an obstacle to quick deployment, said Bodo Ellmers, director of sustainable development finance at Global Policy Forum, an independent policy watchdog.
“If those funds had been paid out earlier they could have been used to prevent the spread in some of those poor countries – the later you intervene the costlier it gets, in terms both of lives and money needed to remedy the situation,” he said.
Deutsche Welle reports: “The World Bank’s bond sale was 200% oversubscribed, meaning investors saw moneymaking opportunities with the high-yield returns on offer. Most buyers came from Europe, and included specialized catastrophe bond investors as well as asset managers and pension funds.
According to Bloomberg, asset managers including Bailie Gifford, Amundi and Stone Ridge Asset Management are among those who hold the riskier Class B bonds.
The interest and coupon payments made to investors have been funded largely by the donor nations Japan and Germany. The Class A bonds feature an interest rate of 7% while the Class B bonds’ rate is 11%.
According to the PEF, around $75.5 million had been paid to bondholders in the form of premiums as of August 2019. The full amount paid in interest and coupons has not been disclosed. The bonds are set to mature in July 2020.”
We later found out that investors made about 96 million in 2020.
The governments who donated for this have no money of their own, they spend your money.
December – 2020 WB still pounded by media and investors for PEF’s failure:
India Times delivered the best indictment in mainstream media, from what I’ve seen so far:
HOW PANDEMIC BONDS BECAME THE WORLD’S MOST CONTROVERSIAL INVESTMENT
In late January 2015, just after the deadliest outbreak of Ebola in history, then-World Bank President Jim Yong Kim stood in front of a group of Georgetown University students and professors to introduce a new approach to fighting pandemics.
Fresh from the annual gathering of power brokers and policy makers in Davos, Kim described a new type of financial product – “pandemic bonds” – that he hoped would persuade private investors to swell the World Bank’s coffers. …
Five years later, Summers had some different words for Kim, though you probably won’t hear the former World Bank president repeat them in public. The approach was “a dumb idea,” Summers said in a February 2020 email to a Harvard colleague seen by Bloomberg News. Modeled on catastrophe debt that pays insurance claims on natural disasters, the program was too complicated and ultimately unnecessary, he suggested, “like me insuring my toaster.”
Trumpeted by the World Bank at their launch as an innovative example of a public-private partnership, pandemic bonds have since become the subject of intense criticism for failing to divert money fast enough to battle deadly waves of Ebola and Covid-19. Academics from Harvard to the London School of Economics have lambasted the program for being ineffective and expensive, and the World Bank has confirmed it won’t issue a second round of the debt.
…
But the pandemic bonds weren’t designed to default at the earliest sign of a pandemic. The 386-page prospectus for the debt covered a range of outbreaks including Ebola, influenza and coronaviruses and spelled out very specific conditions for writedown – an effort to automate the typically political process of distributing funds. The list of triggers was long and complex, balancing investors’ desires for a long payout stream with the World Bank’s need to disburse the money to countries that need it. “We had to think through how this instrument should actually function, what kind of diseases should be addressed,” said Ivo Menzinger, who leads the group responsible for public sector solutions at Swiss Re. “During that process it got considerably broader.”…
when Ebola returned in 2018 to ravage West Africa again, the bonds failed to trigger. The virus killed almost 2,300 in the Democratic Republic of Congo, but per the criteria in the prospectus, it didn’t spread far enough, fast enough to qualify as a pandemic. In an effort to avoid political grappling over donor funds, the pandemic bonds relied on mechanical triggers that failed to fire. So investors kept getting paid interest and retained their principal. Meanwhile, the World Bank allocated $61 million from the PEF’s “cash window” – the discretionary portion of money funded by donor contributions – to help fight the outbreaks.
Even when Covid-19 began to sweep the globe earlier this year, it was unclear whether the bonds would get written down. The coronavirus had killed almost 150,000 people in dozens of countries before the casualty rates aligned with the “exponential growth” requirement set out in the bond prospectus. On April 16, more than five weeks after the WHO had declared a global pandemic, AIR Worldwide issued a report confirming that the conditions for a writedown had been met, diverting $132.5 million to the World Bank for disbursement. A further $63.3 million came from the swaps struck with Munich Re and Swiss Re.
“The triggers had to be late and they had to be convoluted and complex to reduce the probability that the financing would be triggered,” says Olga Jonas, a critic of the bonds who worked for more than three decades at the World Bank …
Meanwhile, the World Bank quietly announced it would not be issuing a second round of the debt. Unlike the launch of the pandemic bonds, the news came with little fanfare; it was just one line added to their website.
“The issues raised by COVID-19 are profound and require a deep rethinking of our pandemic response infrastructure,” Kim said. “If we can say that the PEF got it wrong, it wouldn’t be the only institution or instrument that got it wrong.”
WHAT SILVIEW.MEDIA MAKES OF ALL THESE FACTS
Learning what we have learned about the World Bank worrying about an impending economic collapse and, in parallel, setting up this pandemic, one may be confused how all this falls together in the grand scheme. Failing to see it is due to overcomplication, I suspect. Brush off the meaningless details and go for the essential questions:
How did this work, most basically?
Fabricated disease fearmongering and unrealistic promises persuaded some fools to transfer money to some con artists, under various pretenses.
WHO benefitted?
The con artists and the Great Reset budgets.
Who lost?
The total morons who haven’t yet learned why it’s not good to swim with sharks, no matter how you see yourself. And if it’s not good to swim with them, giving them money sounds even dumber.
Where have we seen this “business model” before?
Vaccines / WHO / GAVI…
EPILOGUE
APRIL 2021: WHO BOSS MENTIONS THE BONDS ON THE LIST OF THEIR PAST SUCCESSES
Around min. 13 in the video below.
MARCH 2021: WB RELAUNCHES CATASTROPHE BONDS
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