{"id":195204,"date":"2025-10-12T15:44:09","date_gmt":"2025-10-12T15:44:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/195204\/"},"modified":"2025-10-12T15:44:09","modified_gmt":"2025-10-12T15:44:09","slug":"the-imf-boss-is-right-to-say-buckle-up-the-global-economy-is-facing-multiple-menaces-heather-stewart","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/195204\/","title":{"rendered":"The IMF boss is right to say \u2018buckle up\u2019 \u2013 the global economy is facing multiple menaces | Heather Stewart"},"content":{"rendered":"

Little more than 48 hours passed last week between a warning from the IMF chief, Kristalina Georgieva, that \u201cuncertainty is the new normal\u201d<\/a> and Donald Trump\u2019s latest tariff onslaught \u2013 this time aimed at China.<\/p>\n

Markets plunged on Friday after Trump threatened to levy punitive additional tariffs of 100% on Chinese goods<\/a> in retaliation for Beijing\u2019s blocks on exports of rare earth minerals.<\/p>\n

The world\u2019s finance ministers and central bankers will meet in Washington this week for the annual meetings of the IMF and World Bank<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In her curtain-raiser speech for the gathering, Georgieva rightly pointed out the global economy has proved more resilient than some feared at the time of the spring meetings in April, when the world\u2019s policymakers were transfixed by the chaos emanating from the White House.<\/p>\n

Part of the reason for that has been \u201cfront loading\u201d: Trump\u2019s intention to jack up tariffs was no secret, and many companies ran up inventories in advance and started to rejig their supply chains.<\/p>\n

Another explanation is that the US\u2019s trading partners have in general preferred to use a combination of flattery and capitulation in the face of Trump\u2019s approach, rather than causing an all-out trade war.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, firms and governments have increasingly been forging new trade connections that bypass the US, creating what Adam Posen, the director of the Washington-based Peterson Institute for International Economics<\/a>, has called a \u201cnew economic geography\u201d.<\/p>\n

There was evidence of this in the latest update from the UN\u2019s trade and development arm, Unctad,<\/a> last week.<\/p>\n

\u201cTrade growth remained positive in the first half of 2025, despite rising trade policy uncertainty, persistent geopolitical tensions and a challenging global economic environment,\u201d Unctad reported.<\/p>\n

Far from grinding to a halt, global trade expanded by more than $500bn (\u00a3375bn) in the first half of the year and was expected to continue growing in the third quarter, with much of the momentum coming from developing countries.<\/p>\n

Adding to the sense of shifting tectonic plates, Unctad highlighted the continued prevalence of \u201cfriendshoring\u201d \u2013 the phrase coined by the former Federal Reserve governor Janet Yellen to describe trading with trusted geopolitical allies.<\/p>\n

The impact of tariffs on the US economy also appears to have been less dramatic than first feared \u2013 though with policy continuing to change by the week, the full effects have likely not yet reached American consumers.<\/p>\n

Yet Friday\u2019s furore was a reminder that, as Georgieva argued, there are still reasons to be fearful \u2013 or as she put it: \u201cGlobal resilience has not yet been fully tested. And there are worrying signs the test may come.\u201d<\/p>\n

As the new row with China<\/a> shows, Trump is continuing to wield tariffs as a weapon, creating fresh shocks in financial markets. The impact has been especially tough in developing countries, some of which, as Unctad pointed out, have faced some of the highest tariffs.<\/p>\n

Away from trade policy, the White House continues to pursue unfunded tax cuts and trash the economic institutions usually considered the cornerstones of credibility \u2013 including the Federal Reserve.<\/p>\n

Over time, that must surely undermine market confidence, including in US Treasuries (government bonds) \u2013 an important benchmark against which assets in global markets are valued. There is little sign of that yet; but once lost, economic credibility is hard to rebuild.<\/p>\n

Part of the reason markets have not responded more skittishly to this and other concerns is that the economic picture is being flattered by another extraordinary and unpredictable phenomenon: the AI boom.<\/p>\n

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That amounts to another reason to worry. A wall of funding continues to pour into the tech industry as investors bet on the future of generative AI and battle to build the massive datacentres required to train and run the models<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Data from the World Trade Organization last week showed that a full 20% of the growth in global goods trade in the first half of the year was accounted for by \u201cAI-related goods \u2013 including semiconductors, servers, and telecommunications equipment\u201d, much of it flowing from Asia to the US.<\/p>\n

As Ben May of Oxford Economics said recently: \u201cThe surge in US capital spending to develop AI capability has been masking weakness in other parts of the domestic economy.\u201d<\/p>\n

However, a growing number of observers have begun to fret that generative AI may not deliver the extraordinary gains that would justify Wall Street valuations of the tech companies.<\/p>\n

And the increasingly complex web of cross-shareholdings between some of the key firms involved has raised eyebrows<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The Bank of England last week became the latest body to warn about the risk of a \u201csudden correction\u201d<\/a> in global markets if the AI boom goes into reverse.<\/p>\n

\u201cOn a number of measures, equity market valuations appear stretched, particularly for technology companies focused on artificial intelligence. This \u2026 leaves equity markets particularly exposed should expectations around the impact of AI become less optimistic,\u201d it said.<\/p>\n

Georgieva echoed that caution, comparing the AI boom to the dotcom bubble around the turn of the millennium. \u201cToday\u2019s valuations are heading toward levels we saw during the bullishness about the internet 25 years ago,\u201d she warned, raising the spectre of a \u201csharp correction\u201d.<\/p>\n

The dollar and dollar-denominated assets remain the lifeblood of much of global finance, despite efforts since the financial crisis to build up the importance of other currencies \u2013 so an AI crash would reverberate worldwide.<\/p>\n

Perhaps it is fitting that Trump has unleashed a new round of destabilising threats just as policymakers fly into town to take the temperature of the world economy. It certainly drove home Georgieva\u2019s central message to them: \u201cBuckle up.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Little more than 48 hours passed last week between a warning from the IMF chief, Kristalina Georgieva, that…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":195205,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[84,1294,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-195204","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-economy","8":"tag-business","9":"tag-economy","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom","12":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/195204","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=195204"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/195204\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/195205"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=195204"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=195204"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=195204"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}