The International Monetary Fund (IMF) is something like a global weather station for the economy, carefully registering even the tiniest of disruptions to the world economic stage. And in the past week, IMF analysts have concluded that a storm is brewing on the horizon.
Its experts carefully register every impulse, and in the past week they've concluded that the forecast is looking increasingly dark. "I see storm clouds building," David Lipton, the IMF's first deputy managing director, recently said in London, adding that the global banking system isn't ready for another downturn. "The work on crisis prevention is incomplete," he said.
The economic outlook is worsening almost by the week. A general consensus among economy experts has emerged that 2019 will be worse for all large national economies than last year. Stock exchanges already began dropping last year, with Germany's blue-chip index DAX losing almost 20 percent of its value in 2018 while the Dow Jones also showed losses. » | Christian Reiermann | Tuesday, January 8, 2019
