Giving money to foreigners is always likely to be one of the first things to be sacrificed when there are cuts in government spending to be made. But this year the House of Representatives appropriations committee went further than might have been expected.

The committee said it would not fund general capital increases for the World Bank and institutions including the Inter-American, African and Asian development banks that had painstakingly been negotiated by the banks’ shareholder countries.

If this threat is carried through, it will have serious consequences for the multilateral development banks, which finance their activities by borrowing commercially against their capital base. The last World Bank capital increase was two decades ago and winning agreement on a new one was being seen as a success for Robert Zoellick, its president.