The US-China trade war will hobble global growth, the International Monetary Fund warned Tuesday, cutting its forecast for this year and next and predicting that “everyone is going to suffer” from a clash between the world’s two biggest economies.
At a meeting on the Indonesian island of Bali, the IMF painted a cautious picture for the near future, saying trade tensions and rising debt levels could dent China and the US -and leave developing economies especially vulnerable to sudden stresses.
“There is no denying that the susceptibility to large global shocks has risen,” the IMF’s top economist Maurice Obstfeld told reporters after the fund cut its outlook for global GDP growth by 0.2 percentage points to 3.7 percent for 2018 and 2019.
