“Get your fiscal health in order,” is a key message at the International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) annual meeting here in Thailand.
The IMF is worried about the debts of the world’s biggest economies. It is doing its job as a watchdog, looking for and warning about financial vulnerabilities.
In the meantime, the finance ministers of former crisis countries are boasting about how little their borrowing costs have gone up, compared to the world’s biggest economies, such as the US.
On three occasions in the past 24 hours, top IMF officials have praised the UK’s plans to reduce its annual levels of borrowing, bucking the trend of the rest of the G7 group of countries, which includes Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and the US.
The IMF clearly seeing the UK in a different light to these major economies is very interesting.
“The UK is actually one country where action to reduce debt and deficit has been taken decisively and we see the UK in that sense enjoying a bit of a better growth prospect,” managing director Kristalina Georgieva said earlier.
Her comments followed those of the IMF’s chief economist Silvana Tenreyro who told me that UK borrowing reductions “stand out”.