What is more worrying in IMF’s commentary is the non-trade red flags to overall macroeconomic stability. It has flagged four key factors here — the Artificial Intelligence boom, the structural crisis in the Chinese economy, growing fiscal pressures, and an erosion in institutional credibility. These are factors that can have deeply destabilising effects via bursting of asset bubbles, overinvestment in one economy generating headwinds for others and, eventually, imploding, and turmoil in financial and capital markets.

As much as economists may want to pretend that these issues are technocratic in nature, they also have deep political-economy roots that require a careful calibration between markets, State and democratic processes. Their successful and safe resolution requires not just national but international cooperation, which can happen only if domestic pressures are under control. Much of the friction preventing such cooperation from being achieved is a result of politics, which gained from unequal distribution of the fruits of growth in the past few decades, while leaders were celebrating aggregate outcomes. The short point is, one cannot wish for status quo ante to restore sanity in the global economic system. It has to be a new deal which prioritises justice without voodoo economics or punters running riot.