Indian envoy warns of 'big red line,' days after charges laid in Nijjar case
India's envoy to Canada insists relations between the two countries are positive overall, despite what he describes as 'a lot of noise.'
Two principal economists painted very different pictures Thursday of what the global economy will look like in the coming years.
Kristalina Georgieva, managing director of the International Monetary Fund, told an audience at Georgetown University on Thursday that the IMF is once again lowering its projections for global economic growth in 2023, projecting world economic growth lower by US$4 trillion through 2026.
"Things are more likely to get worse before it gets better," she said, adding that the Russian invasion of Ukraine that began in February has dramatically changed the IMF's outlook on the economy. "The risks of recession are rising," she said, calling the current economic environment a "period of historic fragility."
Meanwhile, U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, on the other side of town at the Center for Global Development, focused on how the U.S. and its allies could contribute to making longer-term investments to the global economy.
She called for ambitious policy solutions and didn't use the word "recession" once. But despite Yellen's more measured view, she said "the global economy faces significant uncertainty."
The war in Ukraine has driven up food and energy prices globally -- in some places exponentially -- with Russia, a key global energy and fertilizer supplier, sharply escalating the conflict and exposing the vulnerabilities to the global food and energy supply.
Additionally, the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, rising inflation and worsening climate conditions are also impacting world economies and exacerbating other crises, like high debt levels held by lower-income countries.
Georgieva said the IMF estimates that countries making up one-third of the world economy will see at least two consecutive quarters of economic contraction this or next year and added that the institution downgraded its global growth projections already three times. It now expects 3.2% for 2022 and now 2.9% for 2023.
The bleak IMF projections come as central banks around the world raise interest rates in hopes of taming rising inflation. The U.S. Federal Reserve has been the most aggressive in using interest rate hikes as an inflation-cooling tool, and central banks from Asia to England have begun to raise rates this week.
Georgieva said "tightening monetary policy too much and too fast -- and doing so in a synchronized manner across countries -- could push many economies into prolonged recession." Maurice Obstfeld, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley, recently wrote that too much tightening by the Federal Reserve could "drive the world economy into an unnecessarily harsh contraction."
Yellen agreed Thursday that "macroeconomic tightening in advanced countries can have international spillovers."
The two economists' speeches come ahead of annual meetings next week of the 190-nation IMF and its sister-lending agency, the World Bank, which intend to address the multitude of risks to the global economy.
Georgieva said the updated World Economic Outlook of the fund set to be released next week downgrades growth figures for next year.
Many countries are already seeing major impacts of the invasion of Ukraine on their economies, and the IMF's grim projections are in line with other forecasts for declines in growth.
The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development last week said the global economy is set to lose $2.8 trillion in output in 2023 because of the war.
The projections come after the OPEC+ alliance of oil-exporting countries decided Wednesday to sharply cut production to support sagging oil prices in a move that could deal the struggling global economy another blow and raise politically sensitive pump prices for U.S. drivers just ahead of key national elections in November.
Yellen said since many developing countries are facing all challenges simultaneously, from debt to hunger to exploding costs, "this is no time for us to retreat."
"We need ambition in updating our vision for development financing and delivery. And we need ambition in meeting our global challenges," she said.
India's envoy to Canada insists relations between the two countries are positive overall, despite what he describes as 'a lot of noise.'
With Donald Trump sitting just feet away, Stormy Daniels testified Tuesday at the former president's hush money trial about a sexual encounter the porn actor says they had in 2006 that resulted in her being paid to keep silent during the presidential race 10 years later.
The U.S. paused a shipment of bombs to Israel last week over concerns that Israel was approaching a decision on launching a full-scale assault on the southern Gaza city of Rafah against the wishes of the U.S.
Footage from dozens of security cameras in the area of Drake’s Bridle Path mansion could be the key to identifying the suspect responsible for shooting and seriously injuring a security guard outside the rapper’s sprawling home early Tuesday morning, a former Toronto homicide detective says.
A chicken farmer near Mattawa made an 'eggstraordinary' find Friday morning when she discovered one of her hens laid an egg close to three times the size of an average large chicken egg.
Susan Buckner, best known for playing peppy Rydell High School cheerleader Patty Simcox in the 1978 classic movie musical 'Grease,' has died. She was 72.
Accused killer Jeremy Skibicki could have a challenging time convincing a judge that he is not criminally responsible for the deaths of four Indigenous women, a legal analyst says.
A Calgary bylaw requiring businesses to charge a minimum bag fee and only provide single-use items when requested has officially been tossed.
Two Nova Scotia men are dead after a boat they were travelling in sank in the Annapolis River in Granville Centre, N.S., on Monday.
An Ontario man says he paid more than $7,700 for a luxury villa he found on a popular travel website -- but the listing was fake.
Whether passionate about Poirot or hungry for Holmes, Winnipeg mystery obsessives have had a local haunt for over 30 years in which to search out their latest page-turners.
Eighty-two-year-old Susan Neufeldt and 90-year-old Ulrich Richter are no spring chickens, but their love blossomed over the weekend with their wedding at Pine View Manor just outside of Rosthern.
Alberta Ballet's double-bill production of 'Der Wolf' and 'The Rite of Spring' marks not only its final show of the season, but the last production for twin sisters Alexandra and Jennifer Gibson.
A mother goose and her goslings caused a bit of a traffic jam on a busy stretch of the Trans-Canada Highway near Vancouver Saturday.
A British Columbia mayor has been censured by city council – stripping him of his travel and lobbying budgets and removing him from city committees – for allegedly distributing a book that questions the history of Indigenous residential schools in Canada.
Three men in Quebec from the same family have fathered more than 600 children.
A group of SaskPower workers recently received special recognition at the legislature – for their efforts in repairing one of Saskatchewan's largest power plants after it was knocked offline for months following a serious flood last summer.
A police officer on Montreal's South Shore anonymously donated a kidney that wound up drastically changing the life of a schoolteacher living on dialysis.