World’s Finance Ministers Are Dazed and Confused
The path to faster growth and rising prosperity starts with avoiding a trade war.
The IMF tries to keep up.
Photographer: Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images
Financial officials have rarely seemed so bewildered. At this week’s meetings of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, finance ministers and central bank governors expressed alarm at rapidly deteriorating global growth prospects — thanks not to an unforeseen calamity, as with Covid-19, but to America’s erratic economic policy.
With the White House still proposing a “baseline” tariff of 10% on all US trading partners, and a who-knows-how-high duty on Chinese imports, the IMF’s economists say that “uncertainties have climbed to new highs.” The outlook is so muddled that they’ve set normal practice aside and offered a “reference forecast,” as opposed to an actual forecast — saying, in effect, that their own projections would probably be wrong by the time anyone read them.