What are the trade‑offs holding back global growth? Join economists and leaders at Davos 2026 as they debate risks, policies, and paths to stronger economies.
At Davos 2026, IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva argued that global growth has proven more resilient than expected, with the IMF projecting 3.3% this year and 3.2% next year. Despite tariff headlines, she said trade tensions were “a sweet, cute little poodle,” as tariffs were recalibrated and much of the world kept trading, often deepening regional and tech links. She credited four supports: private-sector agility, limited trade drag, an AI investment surge, and steadier macro management by central banks and fiscal authorities. Still, she warned that high debt and recurring shocks make fiscal buffers essential: “Spend but keep the receipts,” and now “balanced budget is your tool to prepare” for inevitable disruptions. Consolidation should be country-specific—sometimes drastic (Argentina), often gradual with credible plans that can lower borrowing costs (Italy). On AI, Georgieva forecast a productivity boost of 0.1%–0.8% to global growth but called labor-market disruption “like a tsunami,” affecting 40% of jobs globally (60% in advanced economies). Risks include unequal access, cybercrime, and deepfakes; AI is “unstoppable,” demanding pragmatic standards. On IMF relevance, she was blunt: “I don’t lose sleep,” citing universal surveillance and lending where “nobody wants to lend.”
Well, good afternoon, everybody. It's a great pleasure to see you. I gather that our numbers might have been slightly depleted by the last minute announcement that Elon Musk is here, I suppose, to upstage Donald Trump. But this is the really elite event, of the afternoon, because it's my great pleasure. I'm Neil Ferguson. I'm a historian based at the Hoover Institution at Stanford. To have a conversation, not our first with Kristalina Georgieva, who is, as you all doubtless know, the managing director of the International Monetary Fund and has been in that role since 2019. Before that, she was at the world Bank. And we were just saying that since you took on the job of the IMF, we have not had a boring year. And I'm sorry to tell you that I don't think 2026 is going to be a boring year either. Let's start with the newly published World Economic Outlook. I'm an avid consumer of that publication and of its wonderful database, which really is an invaluable tool for anybody trying to understand the world economy. You and I were just at a lunch earlier today at which some of the Americans present were talking a big game about US economic growth. We know that the most recent data, I think, for third quarter is revised up to 4.4%. But I was hearing talk at lunch of of growth rates north of 5%. Then I turned to the World Economic Outlook. And your 2026 estimate for the US is, well, it's half that. It's 2.4%. So who's going to be right? Do you think?
Let me start by saying that I always cheer when performance of our members exceeds our projections. So bring it on. It is good for the world economy. Talking about the projections for the United States, we actually upgraded, what we expect the US to achieve in 2026. For reasons that are obvious. There has been strong performance in 25, and there is still expectation that further actions to simplify rules create better opportunities for US companies to prosper. They can lift growth even further. Stepping back from the US, what is most interesting in this world economic outlook? That when you look at our projections, 3.3% this year, 3.2% next year for the world as a whole. That brings us back where we were just before Liberation Day. This is what we projected then. Then we said, oh my God, tariffs are going to hold growth down. We downgraded somewhat. We never ever predicted recession. There were many saying it's going to be horrible. We were not among those and when we look at the world we are upgrading the eurozone 0.2%. Now. They're 1.3% for this year. We are upgrading China. India has done remarkably well. We are upgrading India. Why is it that despite all the uncertainty and all the turbulence, the world economy is performing so well? So look under the hood. What do we see there? We see four remarkable factors one, the incredible agility and adaptability of the private sector. And since the global financial crisis, in particular, in many countries where the government was more active, hands on, on the economy, it pulled out, letting the private sector do what the private sector is very good at, take more risk, act more swiftly when there is changing conditions. Two the trade tensions that we experienced throughout this year proved to be of a lesser menace. I actually use an analogy. I say, well, we expected a big German shepherd to bark. It turned to be a sweet, cute little poodle. It still said woof woof, but no big impact. We actually, are assessing both the US behavior. The US tariffs have been recalibrated downwards and then what is collected is less than what is announced. But most importantly, we look at the rest of the world. The rest of the world is trading. They are saying tariffs. Thank you but no thank you. That may change. But for now, if anything, countries, especially in neighborhoods, they are strengthening their trade links and trade in tech related stuff has gone up. And that is the third reason. Enthusiasm about AI investments in AI, especially in the United States, but not only. And then the fourth reason is one I want to really hammer on, because we don't give enough credit to institutions holding the world economy in a better place. But central banks and fiscal authorities have done a pretty decent job support the economy when it needs the support, try to pull back when it is necessary to consolidate. Now, is everything hunky dory? No. We have a very high level of debt almost everywhere, and governments find it very difficult once they provide support to businesses and households to pull it back when it is not necessary anymore. We have geopolitical factors in play. We have the uncertainty of how uplifting AI is going to be. And the last one I want to stress the unknown. Accidents do happen. Things we don't expect hit us. And that I would finish with. What is our advice to our members? We say build strong fundamentals, build buffers. So when a shock hits you, you're in a good position to absorb it.
Well, yes. You and I remember six years ago when most of the conversation happening here was about climate change and a pandemic had already begun. Yes, there's a great opportunity now for us to use technology, talking not so much of AI, but just information technology to do some polling. Now there is a Slido, option here, which requires, I guess you to have your phones or iPads or other devices use that QR code that's up there on the screen and take a picture of it. Hopefully it doesn't go to a restaurant menu. And then we are going to have two polling questions. Each one is a a multiple choice question. And when my friends in the technical department, decide it's time, the questions should appear on the screen and also on your devices. There you go. And we can see, the first set of questions allows us to rank the factors posing the greatest threat to global growth today. As you just said, Kristalina, the the hard thing at a time like this is to know what's coming. So you can see there as I'll give people time to vote. Not wholly surprisingly, after the events of this week, it looks like geopolitical tensions are at number one, closely followed by rising protectionism, overall policy uncertainty, then persistent inflation. Oh, look too soon. I'll give it a minute. I don't know, sometimes when they use Slido awful music plays. At this point. I'm glad that the World Economic Forum doesn't do that. I think we'll perhaps close the voting now. I want to stress that.
Not yet. It's still moving.
When should I stop a signal from.
I guess right now.
There we go.
Whatever is done.
Is done. Closed. Well, let me just stress for any pollsters present, this is a rather small sample, for any kind of polling. And I wouldn't say a representative one, given that by the very nature of this event, we're not exactly a representative sample of the world's population, much less the Swiss population. But, there you see, interestingly, that, inflation is actually just above higher borrowing costs. Before I ask you to comment on that, let's do, the slightly trickier next question. It's trickier because there are more options. And you'll actually have to just be careful because some of them aren't immediately visible. We're going to have to scroll down. So essentially the question here is what measures should governments adopt increase growth. You're allowed to select five. This is your moment to be a finance minister, something some of you all almost certainly craved that you could be. And we'll see. Give it a moment. You're essentially being given some fiscal options and some monetary options and some trade policy options. This was the one I was really looking forward to, actually, because this is the tough one. There's some fiscal conservatives in the room, that's for sure. Did John John Maynard.
These are my, my, my kind of people. I was going to say.
It's an IMF crowd, but it's a it's a free trade or at least a freer trade. Crowd. I guess raising defense spending is there. But cutting defense spending not far behind it. So we have a policy. We have a policy division, there. And it looks like. Can we just scroll down and see if anybody's voted at all to raise tariffs?
Yes.
I was wondering if there was a secret Trump sympathizer in the room. So for me, there's something quite fascinating going on here. We actually have a complete split on defense spending, which is, is very interesting. This might reflect, the European bias in the World Economic Forum audience, because I'm not sure everybody is convinced that they need to raise defense spending in the way that they're supposed to. We're still polling vote early, but don't vote often. So this is an opportunity for us to discuss these, I guess, different policy tools, beginning with fiscal policy. I think we're still alive, but I'm going to conclude that this is a fiscally hawkish room, with, balancing budgets as the number one, policy option. You ended your opening remarks, Kristalina, by pointing out that the world has a major public debt problem, a number of the world's most advanced economies now have debt to GDP in excess of 100%, which is conventionally seen as too high. There are also quite a lot of developing countries in that situation. And what's perhaps even more disturbing is that there are some countries, the United States has one that appear to have no path back to a balanced budget. Certainly, if one looks at the Congressional Budget Office projections, it's 6% of GDP as far as their projections go. So do you agree with the idea that we should be looking to balance budgets because Keynesians I mean, Paul Krugman must be turning, in, in his bed in, in despair. But the Keynesians would certainly have said that's the wrong the wrong approach. How do you think about it?
Well, the so let's look at the last couple of years, governments have spent quite a lot of money. First, Covid rightly so. Protect businesses, protect households. There was some discussion. Did they spend too much at the fund? We had a very strong message at the start of Covid when there was high uncertainty. What is coming next? The economy was in a standstill. We said to governments, spend but keep the receipts. In other words, spend responsibly. I to that day have a hard time accepting that at the moment of complete paralysis of the world economy, there was a way to know how much is enough. And yes, perhaps some countries could have done less and reach the same outcome, which is the economy doesn't collapse. But what is more important is what happened next. Next. Instead of governments being in a position to significantly reduce spending, we had Russia's invasion of Ukraine. And it was dramatic because it pushed food and energy prices up, and it created yet again pressure on governments to protect people and protect, protect the functioning of the economy. So there was a second round of borrowing this time, however, in a different, monetary policy environment, when interest rates no more were close to 0 or 0 or even negative in some cases. And then on top of it, we have seen a, inflationary lift. Russia, by invading Ukraine caused immense pain on the people of Ukraine, but it has also triggered this raising, you know, increasing borrowing, increasing inflation, increasing borrowing costs. Then as we work to tame inflation down, what was what happened was we had a tariff shock and that in some countries led to steal some more pressure to protect, especially vulnerable to these tariffs businesses. So I'm not saying that to give an excuse. I'm giving an explanation why we ended up in advanced economies, in emerging markets, in low income countries with high level of debt, at a time when interest rates are also higher. It is tough for rich countries. It is devastating for poor countries when they need to pay more to service their debt than they pay for their education and and healthcare. We have seen doubling and tripling of borrowing costs. And that leads us to say you have to balance your budgets. Fiscal consolidation has to be a priority, restructuring your debt if it is not sustainable, has to be a priority because one, you are suffocating your public spending by having this big chunk of money that goes for interest rate service. Two do you know what is going to knock on the door as demand for public policy support next month, next year? I don't. One thing I can say, I do expect shocks to continue to come, whether they're shocks from geopolitics, whether they're shocks because of technological advancement that creates misallocation of workers, whether it is climate shocks, I don't know what is going to be. What I do know is that we live in a world of more frequent exogenous shocks, and that balanced budget is your tool to prepare, face, protect your people when the shock occurs.
Is there a preferable way to get from a fiscal deficit to a balanced budget? We've seen in Argentina one of the most amazing fiscal consolidations, I think, in modern history. An even more amazing is that the man who did it, President Millett, who was beaten here at the forum, survived politically because as far as I could see, looking through data from the IMF and the world Bank, all previous examples of such really stringent fiscal consolidations led to political fallout that the fiscal consolidator didn't survive.
Although it's not always there are examples when governments do the tough stuff and they get reelected. One of the not that far in the history examples is Latvia. The current commissioner, Valdis Dombrovskis, was prime minister. He had to do aggressive cuts of public spending, meaning affecting salaries and pensions. And yet he got reelected. Why? Because people of Latvia, like people in Argentina, can see there is no other way. So I would say different countries have to approach this differently. Argentina has accumulated so much, fiscal menace that that kind of aggressive fiscal consolidation makes sense.
And inflation had got close to inflation.
Inflation was suffocating people. So so this drastic action is justified. Most countries don't don't have to go that far. Most countries can have a, and this is what we recommend to majority of our members, gradual fiscal consolidation. But you have to have a plan. You have to say over this period of time, is it two years? Is it three years? We are going to go down in our budget deficit. We would reduce our debt. We would bring our public finances in good place. I want to give an example in Europe, Italy, Italy traditionally would have been a country where fiscal consolidation is, not easy to move forward. Well, Italy this year is likely to go down to 3% deficit, which is the EU norm. They still have a higher level of debt. They still have work to do, but their borrowing costs dramatically dropped because people believe they're serious. So in most countries, what you have to do is put a plan in place, act on this plan, show you are serious, and then of course reap the benefits. In terms of lower borrowing costs.
Does the fund of a policy preference for spending cuts over tax hikes when countries are moving back towards balance? Or does it not matter?
Well, as I said, different countries face different conditions in some countries. Actually, expanding the tax base is a very good way to improve your budget position. We have countries, actually, we have calculated that's important to, to say we have said, okay, what should be tax to GDP that provides enough resources for a country to function. And we reached consensus. It is 15% tax to GDP at a minimum. Now if you are below.
This can you tell me where that is. Because that sounds great. I mean, there are very few European countries remotely close to that baseline.
I think. I think most European countries are way above where we are not saying. We are not saying you have to go down to 15%. What we're saying. Countries that are below 15% have to go up to 15%. I was meeting with the Prime minister of Pakistan. Pakistan is now taking seriously the need to improve tax collection to expand the tax base. They are now above 10% tax to GDP. They were below 10% tax to GDP. Still a long way to go. So when the situation is such then you need to look at are there tax instruments that need to be put in place. More often than not it is about collection. Tax evasion is a sport popular everywhere in poor countries, in rich countries and reducing, even better. Eliminating tax evasion is a way to have fair distribution of tax burden. Now, we are very keen for countries to be rational in what they spend money for. You saw here a very interesting, split raise defense spending. Actually, it won a little bit above cut defense spending.
I wanted to ask you about that because to me, that's a very surprising thing that we've got more or less the same enthusiasm for raising and cutting.
I'm actually not surprised at all. I'm not surprised because, for for decades, we benefited from a peace dividend after the end of the Cold War. We reduced defense spending, and then we put money, more money in education, in health, in development assistance. And I'm not surprised that there are people that are saying, we like that we want there is opportunity cost of defense spending. And, you know, not surprisingly, 28% say even what you spend now is too much. Now, why is defense spending going up? Let's not forget Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
It goes back to our first poll, does it? The number one risk is geopolitical.
Geopolitical. Now when you have geopolitical risks, of course governments have huge responsibility to protect their people. And that is what is pushing defense spending up. But since our conversation is about growth, governments have three levers to help the economy grow. One is their tax and spending policy. If you are not taxing excessively, that allows businesses and for that matter, households to invest more of their money. The second lever they have is what do they spend money for? I am a big fan of governors, governments that invest in human capital, invest in the infrastructure that is critical for growth and should be publicly supported and invest in R&D, especially in the world of today. And the third lever governments have has nothing to do with money. It is the regulatory setup. We have seen governments that put in place smart policies that are promoting. They make the country attractive to investors, domestic and foreign, that make the dynamism of the economy, more visible, create more jobs. And I have seen governments that suffocate with excessive regulation. Let me say this, though. At the fund, we are in favor of real rule of law and clear regulatory environment frameworks that define what you can do, what you cannot do, how you contribute to society. We are against excessive regulation that suffocates risk taking and private initiative. And we actually crafted the term regulatory house cleaning. We are saying to governments every so often, as you do in your house, look at your regulations. What do you need? What is unnecessary? Get it out.
And of course, one of the things that's driving Argentina, Argentina's growth up is that that's also part of Mr. Malaise agenda. And they've deregulated in all kinds of exciting ways. I want to talk about AI before we go to questions, because one of the things that I'm eager to read, I haven't got there yet in the New World Economic Outlook, is how the fund is thinking about this extraordinary revolution that has been after Greenland, the number one talking point of Davos. So obviously there's a huge CapEx boom going on in the United States. There's also a similar one in in China, a lot of people are banking on major productivity improvements to get the United States out of its fiscal hole and to drive that growth rate up to surprise the IMF to the upside. How are you thinking about that? So the positives, potential positives, and is the fund thinking about the unexpected downsides, say in the labor market?
So first, we are very enthusiastic about anything that can lift up productivity, because over the last two decades, productivity growth has been slow and it holds economic growth down. In fact, about half of the slow growth is because of slow productivity growth. AI holds the promise to significantly lift up productivity. We calculated that impact on global growth could be somewhere between 0.1% and 0.8%. 0.8% is very significant. This would lift global growth above where it was before the pandemic. Now. Others are saying it's going to be more or it's going to be less, or it's going to be none. Our our analysis at this point says 0.1 to 0.8. Then we look at the speed with which this is happening. And this is my main point. It is happening incredibly quickly. Rapid transformation is already taking place. We assessed that 40% of jobs globally are going to be impacted by AI over the next couple of years. They would be either enhanced, more productive, or eliminated altogether, or transformed. No more the same job in advanced economies 60%. And I tell people this is like a tsunami hitting the labor market. Are we ready? Now the honest answer is no. I mean, we kind of have some some thinking around it. So we decided to go deeper and see what is actually happening. We did a kind of a micro-level study that shows that already in advanced economies, 1 in 10 jobs require new skills, 1 in 10 already. Now the other interesting thing is that what is being eliminated very often are the kinds of tasks that are done by new entries in the labor force. So young people primarily. And then we looked at, okay, so these people, the we have more people with higher skills. What happens there. Well they get better pay. They get better pay. They spend more money locally. When they spend more money locally, demand for low skill jobs goes up. And when we looked at the totality, very interesting. 1% higher skilled workers, 1.3% increase in total employment. So ironically, AI is pushing more demand for low skilled workers.
This is bad news if you're, I don't know, a recent. computer science graduate. Of course, you were going to go and work in a tech company.
It is totally bad news for those who aspire for higher quality jobs. And the other thing that is bad news is that the people who are not seeing change in their job descriptions, in other words, they kind of had the skills, they applied these skills, they're squeezed, and they're squeezed, including in terms of their wage negotiation position. So we have to take a very serious look at what is happening in in the labor market. What can we do? And the answer is you would hear it from everybody here in Davos. We have to help people to enhance their skills. We have to make it so that there is more opportunity for businesses to be created, including small, medium sized micro businesses that are demanders of these new skills. And we have to think, what do we do with young people? How do we get young people to be more attuned to this, AI dominated economy? I'll tell you about my organization because it's we do research of what others do, but we also take AI impact very seriously on us. And I'll tell you, in my organization, we already see both job elimination. We used to have 200 interpreters, translators. Now we have 50. We have the privilege of being able to gradually move from here to here, to provide people with opportunities to reskill and do other jobs. Not all organizations can do that. And then I look at, some of our basic functions, like research assistants, their jobs are enhanced. They have AI tools. They can apply to be more productive. They do things better. They do them faster. So far, because our membership demands from us more. We just produce more. But it is something that that is happening fast, I can tell you. I myself took all the training on AI. I got to be a master of copilot because we all have to kind of step forward. And, I have some of my staff that is still sort of saying, AI, may I, I know what to do. I'm doing my job. But see how we how we kind of bring them up.
And as you say, it is all moving very rapidly.
Very rapidly.
I want to, mindful of the time, open it up to the floor. Now for questions. We've got 11 minutes. Of those there's a gentleman there who has quickly raised a hand.
Hello. My name is Mark Gough. I'm from the capitals coalition. The World Economic Forum, a couple of years ago released a report saying that the economy, over 50% of it, is highly dependent on nature. Actually, we know that the economy is completely dependent on nature. How could we restructure debt to include that protection of nature in countries around the world?
We have been supportive of our members that are seeking debt for nature, that for climate action swaps. We think that there is value in, in those, operations. We ourselves, our sister institution, the world Bank, actually introduced some climate resilience clauses in their lending. In our organization, we have fairly standard, rules of how we how we operate. But some two years ago, we created an instrument that is a concessional lending instrument for our members to borrow, to build resilience to climate change. And demand for this instrument is very high. When we think of you're absolutely right to bring natural capital into the equation because we talk about, financial capital, we talk about physical capital, we talk about human capital. But there is nature. Nature is part of how an economy functions. And, I think it is it is very important that we don't lose sight of how we can connect. Solving the debt problem with solving the resilience, problem. And as I said, we have seen some of our members moving in this direction. They have asked us for some, analysis. And while we we don't do it, we we are supportive of that action.
Other questions? Yes. There's a lady just behind you. Kristalina.
Hi.
I've heard here discussion of particularly from the world Bank. But other discussions about the possibility of using AI, particularly AI apps that really are meant to be job creators. So. So we focus so much here on large language models and AGI and sort of the ability to wipe out the the expert labor in the developed in the developed countries like the United States and all those computer scientists who are not going to have jobs. But there seems to be a real opportunity to use AI to do things like create better jobs, more jobs and tourism, more jobs in agriculture, more jobs in infrastructure. And the world Bank is really working on that. And I thought I would ask you to to comment on that. And then related to that, of course, China is following a very different strategy in AI, and their strategy in AI is a diffusion strategy. It's an open, open seek and basically spread it through the economy as fast as possible, create new services and new goods for people and new employment opportunities. So maybe we're focused too much on the large language models and the AI effects on the developed countries, in particular on engineers and computer scientists and accountants in the United States.
Well, I agree that, in the emerging market economies, there is more interest in, AI that is practical, functional, can quickly affect different sectors of the economy. A lot of interest in how you can use AI to improve agricultural productivity, to improve bringing goods to markets. And I think that this is this is really great because for these countries, they, they are at a point where they're still solving a complicated social and economic problems. And if AI can help, great. You ask me something that I didn't answer and it was, are you worried about some of the developments in AI? And I would say we worry about three things. The first one is, what if the productivity dream doesn't come true? And then we see those who poured money into AI running away. We worry about that. We watch it. At this point, we don't see this to be a real present danger. We don't see we don't see the.com kind of problem. Second thing we worry about is the accordion of opportunities opening widely, some countries having great access and some falling behind. And within countries, parts of society benefiting some companies benefiting others not. So we worry about the the this impact. And the third issue we worry about is hallucination and deepfake and all the crime that can be generated with AI. At the fund, we measure the cyber attacks throughout the year and during our annual and spring meetings and during annual spring meetings, they go up. Amazing. So for meetings ago, under 1 million attacks, then 2 million, then 5 million, then 14 million. So it's kind of exponential growth. And we, we do believe that that AI has something to do with it. And then hallucination is for real. How do you separate the good from the bad? But it is. Let me let me say this. It is unstoppable. I don't think that we can turn the clock back and say, no more AI. So my main concern is, are we concentrated to manage it? Are we concentrated on regulating? We chose for us to look into two things systematically. One is labor market impact, and the second one is financial risks. And we look at that systematically. We are not the institution to regulate AI, but somebody has to do it. And and it is very, very unnerving that we don't quite see that. And again, not overregulated, but put some standards and rules and especially on cyber risk and deepfake risks. How is this going to be to be to be handled?
Of course, we have in the past stopped some technologies in their tracks. I'm thinking here of nuclear power, which basically ceased to be deployed after a very small number of accidents. So I sometimes wonder if we're one accident away from a big revulsion against AI.
I again, I'm not I don't have the technical competence to say it can be stopped or this should be stopped and this should be let go. But there. So I've been going around here listening to very smart people who have the technical competence. I mean, for God's sake, come together, figure it out. Let's put, put put a framework that is, that is, that is going to be, to make that safer, fairer and higher utility for, the for everybody. So, so that is that I thought that the World Economic Forum, on this topic could get a little more pragmatic and say, okay, let's see what we can what we can do.
We've just got three minutes left, and I've got to press you on the China question that just was asked, because it strikes me that if China is doing this differently, and I've heard it from Chinese representatives at this meeting, it's diffusing it. It's not pursuing AGI. Is the IMF expecting or already seeing any consequences of that more rapid adoption that seems to be going on in China? After all, if entry level jobs are being affected in the US and at the IMF, I'm wondering if the same thing is going on in China and maybe faster. Any sign of that?
What we are seeing in China, is, it is picking up like, bushfire. And it is, you know, every time I go to China, there is more and more and more and more that they can show that that makes AI in service of this, that and the other. It's medical service. It is in, transport. It is in education. It's in everything we are concerned about. One thing. Will the advancement of this technology in different parts of the world lead to technological compatibility? In other words, countries that are not creators of this technology, they see different options. They can use any one of them, or it would lead to technological decoupling. And this would have which way we go would have quite significant, implications, including for geopolitical directions of our world.
I saw in the corner of my eye one more question, and we've just got time. If you can keep it really short.
Okay, I'll try my best. So back to the geopolitics question. I'm curious to know if you ever get nervous about IMF potentially losing its relevance in today's world. I think on the private lending side, you see a lot more lenders coming into the picture. Big countries like China, but also private lenders like private equity firms buying up debt, investing in infrastructure. And what are some of the things IMF is doing, like what are some of the key pillars you would double down on? I think what was also significant for me was the announcement of the board for peace. Today. That seems to position itself as an alternative to multilateral institutions.
So curious. Well, so.
You want me to be completely frank? I don't lose sleep over this. I lose sleep over what is the next shock to come? Why? Because the first we have been keeping our membership together and functional. Not only that, but we have increased our members over the last years by two. So we now have 191 members. Second, we are the only institution that surveys each and every economy big, small, poor, rich. We do. We survey the United States and we survey, chat, so that nobody else does. How can you see the whole of the world if you cannot see each and every one with the same methodology, same standards of data disclosure? Three we are the only institution that lends to countries nobody wants to lend money to. I don't think that your funds are going to say, oh, let's go to this place that is kind of broke and pour money into it. We currently have 50 programs, five zero. These are countries that need the fund to help them put in place good policies, good institutions, and kind of take them on a path of growth and development. And during my six years, is it six years, five years, five years at the fund, six, six, six years in the fund.
Time is flying. Seventh year for all.
Not yet, not yet, not yet. What I have seen is demand for the fund goes up and kind of commitment of our members to the fund, staying quite strong.
On that.
But thank you for this question.
On that very cheery note that the IMF is in safe hands and has an assured future. I know a fresh proof of this, that you're extremely busy and are probably rushing off to at least five other meetings. So, Kristalina.
Of some of these countries that need the IMF, yes.
We must we must be punctual a little a little bit over time. Thank you, everybody for participating in this discussion. I've enjoyed it hugely. Kristalina. Enjoy the rest of Davos. And, and good luck with the year ahead, which will at some point be your seventh year as managing director.
Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you.