The new world is brutally simple

By all accounts, a world is ending and we don't know what is going to replace it.

- KHURRAM HUSAIN

For Pakistan, this is particularly troubling because, despite what we like to tell ourselves, this country has always been deeply dependent on this world to keep itself afloat.

Rarely has the bigger picture mattered more than it does now. To focus only on the short-term impacts would be a mistake. The bigger picture here is brutal in its simplicity and critical in its importance. For almost half a century now, Pakistan has been kept afloat as a country via bailouts arranged by the institutions of a multilateral world order, chief among them the IMF, followed by the World Bank. The sun is now setting on this world. The day is coming when Pakistan runs into one of its traditional balance of payments crises and runs out of foreign exchange reserves, like it has on more than a dozen occasions over the past four or five decades, and there is nobody around to come to its rescue.

As of this writing, the trade war between the United States and China is escalating with dizzying speed. Within hours, both these countries announced massive tariffs against each other's products, and another round of tariffs was expected from the European Union. Something highly unusual was happening in the financial markets too, as stock and bond markets both started to collapse simultaneously. Usually, these two move in opposite directions because money pulled out of one goes into the other. A simultaneous plunge in both shows far deeper chaos gripping world markets.

Here are some things to note in order to get a handle on a fast-moving situation.