This is a global capitalist financial institution, whose members today comprise almost the entire membership of the United Nations (with the exception of communist countries such as Cuba), that was founded in 1944 at Bretton Woods (in New Hampshire, United States) with the purpose of eliminating poverty around the world by providing low-cost long-term loans to governments and it comprises two institutional wings: The International Bank for Reconstruction and Development and the International Development Association. (The World Bank itself is part of a larger entity called the World Bank Group.) Because the United States is the biggest shareholder in the bank it has traditionally reserved the right to appoint the president of the Bank, a prerogative exercised by whoever has been the president of United States when the occasion has arisen. It is important to stress that while it may appear that the Bank has a laudatory mission, in reality its activities have been far from benign given its emphasis on an economic development agenda that protects the interests of the rich over those of the poor—achieved through the enforcement of capitalist economic principles (neo-liberal economics) that favor, though in not so many words, the hegemony of transnational corporations. So, for example, it has been a strong advocate of the policy of structural adjustment (though in recent years it has toned down this emphasis in the face of strident criticism from those countries so affected by this policy).