A little Trump bullying may steer global economy from another meltdown

Washington

REMEMBER the global economy, the one that nearly collapsed in 2009? Well, it turns out that although we stabilised it, we never actually fixed it, and there is a very real danger that it is about to unwind all over again.

That's the sobering message delivered by the former governor of the Bank of England to a blue-chip gathering on Tuesday evening at the Peterson Institute in Washington. Mervyn King - Lord King to his friends and countrymen - is the closest thing there is to a charter member of the global economic and financial elite, a Cambridge-trained economist who taught at Harvard, MIT and the London School of Economics before settling into a 26-year career at the world's second-oldest central bank. As Mr King sees it, as long as countries such as the United States and Britain continue to run large and persistent trade deficits while countries such as China and Germany continue to run large and persistent trade surpluses, the global economy and the global financial system will remain fundamentally unstable and susceptible to another crisis.