Dan O’Brien: Geopolitics, Ireland, and the emerging world order

This past week finance ministers, central bankers and assorted economists gathered in Washington DC. They met for the annual autumn meeting of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Up for discussion was the state of the world economy, individual economies, the major trends affecting all economies and their policy options. As is traditional at the gathering of the ‘Bretton Woods’ organisations – named after the American town where agreement was reached to set them up in 1944 – one of the set pieces was for the IMF to present its latest economic forecasts. The Fund’s economists believe that the inflation…