It tells you something about the turmoil in the global economy caused by Donald Trump that the question on everyone’s lips as they arrived in Washington last week for the annual meetings of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank was: Will the United States even show up?
US Treasury secretary Scott Bessent may only have had to walk a few hundred metres from his office to meet his fellow finance ministers from around the world, but he hadn’t bothered to attend the last such gathering in February, so there was no guarantee he would attend this one either.
As it turned out, there was no need to worry. Bessent not only came, he also gave an important speech setting out the new administration’s approach to…
