For the last several years, world leaders have made big promises and laid out bold plans to mitigate the climate crisis and help the neediest countries adapt. At this year's World Bank/IMF Spring Meetings, they must demonstrate that they can fulfill these promises, rather than simply touting new ones.

Multilateral development banks are the only institutions that provide the combination of expertise, staying power, low-cost financing, leverage, and knowledge-sharing capabilities needed to assist developing countries. But to help transform these countries' future, the MDBs must first transform themselves.

The World Bank should be a major vehicle for crisis response, post-conflict reconstruction, and, most importantly, for supporting the huge investments necessary for sustainable and healthy global development.

In an environment of secular stagnation in the developed economies, central bankers’ ingenuity in loosening monetary policy is exactly what is not needed. What is needed are admissions of impotence, in order to spur efforts by governments to promote demand through fiscal policies and other means.

Surely the financial crisis of 2008 and its immediate aftermath could have been handled better; battlefield medicine is never perfect. But there is not even a prima facie case to be made for Rob Johnson and George Soros’s allegations of foolish ineptitude on the part of the Obama administration.

Too little was done in the aftermath of the financial crisis a decade ago to stimulate aggregate demand, which would be boosted by a more equal income distribution. And substantially stronger financial regulation than was in place before 2008 needs to be adopted to minimize the risks of future crises.

Echoing conservatives like John Taylor, the Nobel laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz recently suggested that the concept of secular stagnation was a fatalistic doctrine invented to provide an excuse for poor economic performance during the Obama years. This is simply not right.