Anna Edwards

The International Monetary Fund said on Tuesday that the pace of the global economic recovery is slowing, a warning that came as a new war in the Middle East threatened to upend a world economy already reeling from several years of overlapping crises.The eruption of fighting between Israel and Hamas over the weekend, which could sow disruption across the region, reflects how challenging it has become to shield economies from increasingly frequent and unpredictable global shocks. The conflict has cast a cloud over a gathering of top economic policymakers in Morocco for the annual meetings of the I.M.F. and the…

As Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen arrives in Morocco this week to meet with her international counterparts, she will be representing a nation that has led the world’s post-pandemic economic recovery but is now struggling with potentially destabilizing political dysfunction.America came perilously close to defaulting on its debt over the summer and tiptoed toward a government shutdown last month as Republicans fought over the proper levels of federal spending and whether to bankroll more aid to Ukraine. Those events culminated in last week’s ouster of Representative Kevin McCarthy as House speaker, a development that is raising questions about whether the…

After a surge this summer when oil prices approached $100 a barrel, the cost of crude was tumbling again. Now a Middle East war has sent it right back up.Traders drove up the price of oil as much as 5 percent as fighting escalated between Israel and Hamas after the terrorist group attacked the Jewish state from Gaza over the weekend. Prices stabilized on Monday morning, but the global Brent oil benchmark appeared to be grinding back up toward $90 a barrel in the afternoon.No oil is produced in the Gaza area, and Israel produces only a small amount of…

“Everything needed for the front,” Russia’s finance minister declared, echoing a Soviet slogan from World War II as he talked about the government’s latest spending plans.The government still calls its invasion of Ukraine a “special military operation,” but the new budget figures make clear that the economy is increasingly being restructured around war.Nearly a third of the country’s spending next year — roughly $109 billion — will be devoted to “national defense,” the government announced late last month, redirecting money that might otherwise have flowed to health care, education, roads and other sectors. More tellingly, 6 percent of the nation’s…

The fighting between Israel and militants from Gaza could be a blow to the ambitions of Israel and the wider eastern Mediterranean region to become a hub for exporting natural gas to Europe and elsewhere.Those aspirations received a lift when Chevron, the American energy giant, acquired stakes in two large Israeli offshore gas fields when it bought Noble Energy in 2020 for about $4 billion. Nobel Energy had led the way in developing Israeli gas.Natural gas fields off the Israeli coast now account for about 70 percent of the country’s electric power generation, reducing the use of polluting coal. The…