Growing global imbalances, which have seen a handful of countries, dominated by the likes of China, Japan and Germany, lend increasingly large amounts to other countries, including developed economies, and notably the US, are a central theme of our Global Outlook, Summer 2025. Keynes warned as long ago as 1936 of the dangers of a ‘laissez-faire’ approach to international trade policy, which for many nations had become ‘a prime object of practical statecraft’. Presumably, in his view, the new US