America’s $39 trillion national debt has become a familiar political football—batted around in budget negotiations, invoked at congressional hearings, and largely ignored between elections. But what the International Monetary Fund laid out Wednesday is something more unsettling: The U.S. isn’t an outlier. It’s just the most visible symptom of a global disease.
At the spring launch of its biannual Fiscal Monitor, IMF Fiscal Affairs Director Rodrigo Valdés opened with a stark framing: “The world economy is being tested again with the consequences of the war in the Middle East—and this is a world that has less degrees of freedom as public finances are more stretched in many, many countries.”
