Wall Street fund has strings attached
The World Bank reckons it will cost more than $400 billion to rebuild Ukraine. That estimate is a few months old and the destruction continues, so half a trillion dollars is probably now a conservative goal for Kyiv’s allies in the fundraising business. Those include BlackRock and JP Morgan, the FT reports today. They are helping Zelenskyy’s government set up a Ukraine Development Fund that will aim to leverage low-cost public money to attract five or ten times as much from the private sector. So $50 to $100 billion in public seed money will be sought. In return, Ukraine will have to raise its governance game. Translation: deal with corruption. To that end the fund’s board is going to be packed with people from international financial institutions, other governments and overseas banks. Let’s see how Ukraine takes to the idea of so much foreign oversight of a rebuilding job it never asked for.
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