World breathes sigh of relief as Trump spares Fed, IMF

Global policymakers gathering in Washington this week breathed a collective sigh of relief that the U.S.-centric economic order that prevailed for the past 80 years was not collapsing just yet despite Donald Trump's inward-looking approach

- REUTERS

The Spring Meetings of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank were dominated by trade talks, which also brought some de-escalatory statements from Washington about its relations with China.

But some deeper questions hovered over central bankers and finance ministers after Trump's attacks on international institutions and the Federal Reserve: can we still count on the U.S. dollar as the world’s safe haven and on the two lenders that have supported the international economic system since the end of World War Two?

Conversations with dozens of policymakers from all over the world revealed generalised relief at Trump’s scaling back his threats to fire Fed Chair Jerome Powell, the guardian of the dollar’s international status whom he had previously described as a "major loser”.

And many also saw a silver lining in U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s call to reshape the IMF and World Bank according to Trump's priorities because it implied that the United States was not about to pull out of the two lenders that it helped create at the Bretton Woods conference of 1944.