Uncertainty is certain: Inside the IMF and World Bank Spring Meetings

This year's IMF and World Bank Spring Meetings in Washington are unlike any in recent memory. The Iran war has given the annual gathering a geopolitical charge that has drawn an unusually broad crowd, not just the traditional ministers of trade, investment and finance, but foreign policy officials and venture capital executives from across the globe. In this episode of Business Extra, host Salim A. Essaid travels to Washington to speak to some of those attending about what they are looking for and how they are feeling about the state of the global economy. We hear from Mohamed Soliman, senior fellow at the Middle East Institute, who spoke about how this year's theme is uncertainty. The episode also features The National's Washington business correspondent Kyle Fitzgerald, who breaks down the IMF briefings, explaining why this is being described as a textbook supply shock, which countries and regions face the steepest downgrades and what the IMF is advising governments to do in the short term. Nicolas Veron, senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, also joins Salim to examine whether the resilience highlighted in the IMF's outlook is being labelled too generously, whether markets are underpricing the risk of a global recession in the next 12 to 18 months and what those attending can realistically take away from a week of conversations in Washington.

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Uncertainty is certain: Inside the IMF and World Bank Spring Meetings is an episode from Business Extra by The National News.

This episode is 22:44 long.

This episode was published on Apr 15, 2026.

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