The IMF and World Bank Annual Meetings return to Bangkok for the first time since 1991, a year that marked the apparent triumph of convergence, the expansion of global trade, and the beginning of Asia’s extraordinary economic transformation. Thirty-five years later, the world that gathered in Bangkok in 1991 is barely recognizable. The assumptions that markets would converge, institutions would strengthen, and growth would be shared have been tested by the global financial crisis, the pandemic, and a new wave of geopolitical fragmentation that challenges the foundations of the multilateral order.
Against this backdrop, the Global Macro programme steps back from daily data and market noise to examine the monetary and financial order now taking shape. It brings together central bankers, economists, policy leaders, and market experts to consider the forces shaping global growth, the rethinking of monetary policy in a shock-prone world, and the consequences of fragmentation for financial stability and economic governance.
The programme also focuses on monetary sovereignty and emerging-market resilience. Discussions will address digital money and stablecoins, de-dollarisation, capital-flow and commodity volatility, China’s evolving economic model, and the renewed controversy over global imbalances. Across the day, participants will ask whether institutions designed for an integrated global economy can adapt to a more fragmented and contested international system.
Marc Uzan Executive Director, Reinventing Bretton Woods Committee
Axel Weber President, Center for Financial Studies
Fraziali Ismail Assistant Governor, Central Bank of Malaysia
Álvaro Santos Pereira Governor, Central Bank of Portugal
Jonathan Pingle US Chief Economist, UBS (chair)
Klaas Knot Former Chair, Financial Stability Board; Former President, De Nederlandsche Bank; Distinguished Visiting Fellow, PIIE
Arend Kapteyn Global Chief Economist, UBS
(Chair)
Michelle W. Bowman Vice Chair for Supervision, Federal Reserve; Chair, FSB Standing Committee on Supervisory and Regulatory Cooperation
Kristin Forbes Professor of Economics, MIT
Martin Kocher Governor, Austrian National Bank
Gediminas Šimkus Chairman of the Board, Bank of Lithuania and Member, ECB Governing Council
Huw Pill Chief Economist and Member of the Monetary Policy Committee, Bank of England
Zeno Ronald R. Abenoja Deputy Governor, BSP
Arend Kapteyn Global Chief Economist, UBS
(Chair)
Li Kai Chair Professor of Finance, PBC School of Finance, Tsinghua University
Andreas Dombret Chairman of the Board, N26
Alfred Schipke Director, East Asian Institute and Professor in practice Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore
Vera Songwe Chair and Founder, Liquidity and Sustainability Facility
Dominik Weh Partner, Oliver Wyman
(Chair)
fragmentation
Daniel Palotai Deputy Governor of the Magyar
Nemzeti
Bank
Guillermo Tolosa Governor Central Bank of Uruguay
Nouriel Roubini Emeritus Professor of Economics, NYU
Rogelio Mercado Assistant Governor, Central Bank of the Philippines
Massimiliano Castelli Head, Global Sovereign Markets Strategy and Advice, UBS Asset Management
(Chair)
Haibin Zhu Executive Director, Hong Kong Monetary Authority
Steven Barnett Professor of Economics, HKU
Thomas Helbling Deputy Director, Asia and Pacific Department, IMF
Tao Wang Senior Advisor, UBS
(Chair)
Michael Pettis Senior Fellow, Carnegie Endowment for international Peace
Brad Setser Senior Fellow, Council on Foreign Relations
Cynyoung
Park Executive Director, The SEACEN Center
Chair: Shahin Vallee —
Senior Fellow German Council on Foreign Relations
There are better uses for money than buying government bonds if you can invest into the AI boom. And governments need to wake up to that reality.
We should also recognize that so far it's been a fair weather asset class, so the credit cycle has only gone up while private credit has been growing. So we don't know how it will behave if the cycle were to turn.
A supervisory organization can be extremely busy and still fail to focus sufficiently on the risks that matter the most.
Over half of the decisions made by central bankers now is driven by shocks outside the control of their domestic economies and their domestic policymakers.
I think it's easy to get sucked into a debate about trade-offs, but I think I agree very much that it's only a trade-off if you are credible. If you're not credible, you can have adverse developments in inflation and adverse developments in output.
My fundamental belief is that we cannot privatize the benefits of monetary innovation while leaving the public sector with an undefined obligation to absorb the consequences when things go wrong.
Emerging market local currency bonds have been less volatile than advanced market bonds in the last three years already, it's not three months, three years of having less volatility than advanced markets.
China had a real estate correction that should have led to a full-blown crisis anywhere else. The size of the correction and the duration, and we're still in it.
Everyone in China wants to rebalance, but they want to rebalance without a cost, and I think that's what's impossible.
The size of China's surplus, the size of the imbalance is such that in the interest of comity, in the interest of constructive trading relations with the world, China should increase the value of its currency.
I still see it as very much a production phase of AI. I'm still talking about AI building a supply base in terms of data centers, powers, and networks. And the adoption is still in its early days, and it will likely to come in waves.
Dollar stablecoins are likely to reinforce the international dominance of the US dollar. But at the same time, very importantly, it also does not necessarily make the dollar-based financial system more resilient.
Last year I said tech trumps tariffs, this year I've said tech trumps oil, also said tech trumps temper tantrums too, because tech is first order and everything else is second order.
We have argued that for us the external imbalance is sort of the flip side of the domestic imbalance. And that's first and foremost what needs to be addressed.
