Economic growth in both advanced and emerging economies has ground to its slowest pace since the COVID War, according to the Brookings-Financial Times Tracking Index for the Global Economic Recovery.

After a short-lived economic surge last spring, “the indicator of real activity—which comprises data such as GDP, retail sales, industrial production, and employment—has fallen in advanced and emerging economies,” the FT said. “China, Japan, and Germany are among those where real activity has slowed.”

Confidence in the future among advanced nations “has fallen sharply in recent months,” the FT said, although the U.S. “remains one of the few economic bright spots as rising interest rates take their toll elsewhere.”

Optimism among businesses and consumers has “taken major hits,” Eswar Prasad, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, told the FT. “Major engines of growth” are being bogged down by high interest rates, massive public and private debt, and geopolitical strain, he added. 

The chances of a global recession have lessened, thanks in part to the U.S.’s relatively strong economic performance, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) said in a statement as it prepared for its fall meeting last week. 

However, the global economy will struggle for at least the next five years as nations continue to wrestle inflation while being burdened by high interest rates, the IMF warned. Also, inflation will run higher in 2024 than is now expected, it predicted.

The bumpy post-COVID recovery has cost the world $3.7 trillion in lost productivity and caused “a deepening divergence in economic fortunes between and within different country groups,” IMF managing director Kristalina Georgieva said in a public statement earlier this month.

TREND FORECAST: As economic crises mount in emerging nations, citizens will take to the street to protest high prices for food and fuel, the lack of economic opportunity, and governments’ general inability to improve living standards.

As Gerald Celente has often said, “When people lose everything and have nothing left to lose, they lose it.”

And as we have also long forecast, public unrest will spawn new anti-immigration movements, new political parties, and strengthen the popularity of populist parties that promise to “get tough” about real and perceived social and economic chaos.