How resilient is the global economy? Mike Bird, co-host of the Money Talks podcast, speaks with Gita Gopinath, Harvard professor and former IMF chief economist, about her experience steering the financial body through crises and the fiscal risks countries currently face.
00:09 – What was it like working at the IMF during a time of global crises?
01:35 – Can emerging markets stay resilient as U.S. influence fades?
04:37 – How worried should we be about hidden risks in global finance and soaring deficits?
07:22 – How can rich countries fix their fiscal imbalances?
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Questions asked in this interview
4
0:04There's bailouts in various parts of the world. What was the job like?
1:30Not just for the IMF, but do you think there'll be less progress in the future?
So, you spent a while at the IMF. You were there as chief economist and then you were there as first deputy managing director. It's a bit of a mouthful. Tell me a bit about those jobs. It was obviously a very interesting period the last seven years. You've had the pandemic. You've had a number of serious issues for low-income countries immediately after the pandemic. There's the war in Ukraine. There's bailouts in various parts of the world. What was the job like?
So, as you said, Mike, these were very interesting years. The world was getting hit with one shock after another. I joined the IMF in 2019, in January of 2019. That gave me about a year to get my hands into the job and understand the job well. And then there was one big shock after another. So the pandemic in 2019, then you had Russia's invasion into Ukraine, inflation, interest rates being increased everywhere, now geopolitics and geoeconomic fragmentation that continues. So these were turbulent times, but in a sense it was probably the best of times to be at the IMF during these turbulent times because the experience I gained, what I learned through working through all these different crises with member countries, with the fantastic people at the fund, is something I truly treasure.
If you look at the sort of barrage of shocks over the last six or seven years, in particular from US trade policy, US interest rates, global interest rates generally, the pandemic and the inflation that followed, and the sort of commodity price shocks from the invasion of Ukraine, that would in any other circumstance have led to a lot more emerging market crises than you would actually see. Now, that's been, as you say, a huge amount of progress made in governing on the fiscal policy side, investor reliability, borrowing in the currency mix that you choose. Do you worry about the sustainability of that in a world where, shall we say, the US seems substantially less interested as an administration, the current administration, in promoting these sort of norms around the world, in a world where you do see a little bit of sort of fraying around the international order? Is the ability to support and encourage those sort of reforms diminished in general? Not just for the IMF, but do you think there'll be less progress in the future?
I would say that emerging market policymaking has matured to a point where it is somewhat less reliant on whether the US is advocating for it or not. Now that said, what I do worry about is the one crisis we haven't had these last six years, which is a financial crisis in any major economy. That has been the good news, and that's what we describe as resilience in the world economy. But the question is what happens if there were, for instance, financial market turbulence in the US. Right now financial markets are very sanguine. The stock market is booming. The spreads at which corporations can borrow are absolutely squeezed and thin. It looks perfect. If that were to change and you had a big financial event, then the consequences of that for emerging markets could play out very differently than what we saw over the last six years. So that's a risk that I would hope more people worry about than currently exists, especially when you see the pricing in markets. But I think the consequences of that for the world could be much bigger. Also, it could play out very differently from previous crises because this is the first time where we have non-bank financial institutions playing a much bigger role in corporate lending, in access to finance more broadly. And so we've not had a financial crisis that's involved non-bank financial institutions in a big way. And that's what I worry about some more.
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Gopinath, G. (2025, October 30). Former IMF chief economist Gita Gopinath’s warning for rich world economies [Interview transcript]. The Economist. CEOInterviews.AI. https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/3030360/
MLA
Gita Gopinath. "Former IMF chief economist Gita Gopinath’s warning for rich world economies." The Economist, 30 Oct. 2025. Transcript, CEOInterviews.AI, https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/3030360/.
BibTeX
@misc{gopinath2025_3030360,
author = {Gita Gopinath},
title = {Former IMF chief economist Gita Gopinath’s warning for rich world economies},
howpublished = {Interview transcript, The Economist. CEOInterviews.AI},
year = {2025},
month = {oct},
url = {https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/3030360/},
note = {Speaker-attributed transcript with timestamps}
}
