Those concerns will dominate this week’s gathering of finance ministers and central bankers, who are descending on Washington for the International Monetary Fund and World Bank’s annual meetings. The US’s US$20 billion lifeline to help shore up Argentina’s peso and proposals to deploy frozen Russian assets for Ukraine will also be high on the agenda of meetings on the sidelines.
The world economy has so far withstood the biggest barrage of US tariffs since the 1930s as American consumers continued to spend, companies absorbed higher costs and an AI boom fueled a new breed of animal spirits.
But President Donald Trump’s latest threat to impose massive tariffs on China products has stoked renewed fears of another shock for the global economy, compounding warnings of surging government debt and a bubble in technology stocks.
