4th G20 Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors Meeting: Session 1 – global macroeconomic stability

Excellencies, colleagues, 

Allow me to make just one point. Resilience is not the same as stability. We need both. Resilience is the art of recovery and adaptability. Stability is the art of endurance.

We do see resilience around us. Not only has trade not collapsed, it is actually growing at over 5% year-on-year in current prices. Clean technologies are growing. Regional integration has become a source of strength. The world economy has learned to improvise, to adapt, to find a path through uncertainty. That deserves recognition.

But we must not confuse a resilient world with a stable one. Resilience responds to shocks; stability prevents them. Resilience is motion; stability is balance. One allows us to survive disruption — the other allows us to plan beyond it.

And that is precisely our challenge. The forces driving today’s recovery are not always the forces that will sustain tomorrow’s development. Rising trade volumes coexist with rising debt burdens, especially for the vulnerable. Growth in AI-related exports is very concentrated in a few countries and masks double-digit declines in global investment flows. Liquidity returns to markets, but not yet to the countries that need it most. Many countries whose challenges are not captured in the large global averages we discuss, nor in the headlines we read, nor in the trade negotiations we follow. 

Excellencies,

Today’s resilience tells us that the system, for all its strain, still breathes – that the pulse of the global economy remains strong. That is worthy of celebration.

But to turn this energy into something lasting, we need more than resilience. We need predictability.

Stability may be too much to ask – Certainty, even more so.

Yet there is a difference between the three. Certainty belongs to the realm of the absolute; stability, to the realm of the ideal; but predictability, that belongs to us. It is the human version of order – the understanding that while we cannot command events, we can shape expectations. It is what allows entrepreneurs to risk, workers to plan, and nations to cooperate.

For decades, this room has brought predictability to the world. It must continue to do so.

I thank you.