Chinese President Xi Jinping issued some of his starkest language yet about the state of the global economy on Tuesday, telling Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez in Beijing, “The international order is crumbling into disarray,” in remarks reported by Bloomberg, which clarified the Chinese phrase connotes not merely chaos, but also moral decay.
The two leaders were pledging closer bilateral ties and called for a joint front to preserve multilateralism—a pointed signal, directed at Washington, that Beijing intends to fill the vacuum left by America’s more unilateral posture on the world stage.
Xi’s dire assessment is increasingly shared by the world’s most prominent financial voices. BlackRock CEO Larry Fink, speaking to the BBC in late March, laid out a bleak binary: Either the Iran war resolves in a way that reintegrates the country into global markets, pushing oil to $40 a barrel, or the conflict grinds on and oil climbs to $150 with years of supply disruption to follow.
“I don’t think anybody knows what the outcome will be,” he said.
The stakes are enormous. Iran borders the Strait of Hormuz, a narrow waterway through which roughly 20 million barrels of oil flow daily—about 20% of global supply. Since the war began, the strait has been effectively choked: Mines have been laid, shipping traffic disrupted, and the price of passage elevated for the few vessels Tehran has permitted through. The consequences ripple far beyond energy markets. Fertilizer prices, supply chains, agricultural costs—Fink warned it all hangs in the balance.
“We’ll have global recession,” he said flatly about the worst-case scenario.
The International Monetary Fund is sounding similar alarms. In its April 2026 World Economic Outlook, the fund cut its global growth forecast to 3.1% for this year—a meaningful downgrade that it explicitly tied to the outbreak of war in the Middle East. The worst-case scenario was similar to Fink’s: just 2% global growth, the threshold for a global recession.
IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva said ahead of the report, “Even our most optimistic scenario involves a growth downgrade,” noting without the Iran conflict, the fund had actually been preparing to upgrade its projections. Emerging markets and developing economies are expected to bear the most severe pain.
These doom-and-gloom projections coexist uneasily with a U.S. economy that continues to defy gravity, growing at a faster rate than the rest of the developed world and racking up huge stock-market wins, to boot. Earlier this week, the S&P 500 erased all of its losses since the war in Iran began, with many market commentators remarking the Trump TACO trade was going strong.
Economist Scott Sumner, in a widely circulated essay published earlier this month, noted pundits have consistently failed to predict recessions and their recurring warnings have become a kind of reflexive noise. He noted since 1983, there have been just four recessions in the U.S.—roughly one per decade—compared with 19 in the first 83 years of the 20th century. Recession calls tied to the Ukraine war, the Fed’s 2023 rate hikes, and Trump’s Liberation Day tariffs all proved premature.
“In 2026,” he wrote, “an economics grad student might have a clear memory of only one recession, as the economy has been officially in the ‘contraction’ phase of the business cycle for only two out of the previous 200 months—February to April 2020.”
Tyler Goodspeed, chief economist at Exxon Mobil and a former Trump White House economic advisor, makes a complementary case in his new history of recessions: that downturns, far from being inevitable features of capitalism, are historically contingent events—things that happen to economies, not things that simply happen. As Sumner notes, the U.S. recently pulled off its first-ever soft landing, gradually cooling inflation without cratering growth—“and no one seemed to notice.”
That historical amnesia cuts both ways. The same economy that has spent only two of the past 200 months in contraction is now staring down a hot war in the Persian Gulf, a fracturing trade system, and a Chinese president warning of moral as well as geopolitical collapse. Xi, Fink, and the IMF may yet be crying wolf. But the wolf has rarely been this close to the door.
