Stablecoins offer tremendous promise to upgrade the utility of money and payment systems. Especially in a world of agentic AI, stablecoins’ programmability and settlement features might give stablecoins first mover advantage as the dominant form of money for AI agents transacting with each other on behalf of humans.

Stablecoins have great promise but have also provoked anxiety in the emerging markets, especially over currency substitution. How can countries unlock the benefits while managing the risks? My speech today in Cape Town @UCT_news lays it all out. Link / thread below.

Good to see my friends @Treasury_RSA Finance Minister Enoch Godongwana and @SAReserveBank Governor @KganyagoLesetja. We had a good exchange on the global economic outlook and reform priorities that can lift growth in South Africa. Looking forward to seeing you both again in Bangkok.

Discussion with @MarkusEconomist about Messy Jobs: To take it this Summer to the beach, here is the link: (And if you have read it and have a chance to review, we appreciate it).

Spoke to President @nayibbukele this afternoon about El Salvador's extraordinary economic achievements. We are making great progress towards completing the upcoming IMF program reviews. I look forward to visiting San Salvador soon.

Sovereign wealth funds are playing an increasingly important role in the global economy - my colleague Yan Liu explores some of the recent developments and consequences for policymakers.

AI presents an opportunity for Africa to leapfrog to the technological frontier, much like it did with mobile phones. With the right enabling environment, such as reliable baseload power, AI could add about 4% to the region’s GDP over the next decade.

Many economists forget that the first-order problem of an aging society, one with high life expectancy and low fertility, is how to redistribute income from workers to retirees. How fast output grows is, surprisingly enough, the lesser question. If you have roughly as many retirees as workers, what each worker produces must be split in two, one part for the worker, one part for the retiree. At a basic level, it does not matter whether we do it through taxes, as in a pay-as-you-go social security system, or through capital income, as in a fully funded one. Workers will not be happy to see half of their income taken away, whatever the absolute level of that income. This redistribution will poison the political system and lead, with high probability, to dysfunctional policies. We are already seeing it across Europe in the fights over retirement benefits. And much of the American unhappiness about the profits of large corporations, largely owned by the old, is the same conflict, only in the fetishized form of equity ownership. Claims of the form “technological progress (e.g., advances in AI) will fix the problems brought by aging” miss the political economy of the situation. Aging is about politics, not TFP.

Jobs are bundles of tasks. AI and other technologies may eliminate or modify some of many of these tasks, but rarely all of them. Very interesting reporting from the @FT about how AI is changing rather than eliminating entry-level jobs.

I held my first international call with @IMFNews First Deputy Managing Director Den Katz. We discussed preparations for the IMF Executive Board meeting on the first review of Ukraine’s Extended Fund Facility (EFF), which, as confirmed by the Fund, will take place on July 20. The approval of the 1st review by the IMF Executive Board should bring to Ukraine the next tranche of US$690 million of international aid. I thanked the IMF for its consistent support for Ukraine. The Fund continues to play a key role in coordinating international financial assistance for our country. We also agreed to coordinate further steps to ensure financing for Ukraine’s 2027 state budget.

Amid global economic shocks, how resilient has the global economy been? Join IMF economists Petya Koeva Brooks and Deniz Igan for the July 2026 World Economic Outlook Update on Wednesday, July 8 at 9:00 AM ET.

The 2026 Annual Meetings of the IMF and World Bank will open in Bangkok, Thailand, on October 12, 2026. It’s a return to the country that hosted the Meetings 35 years ago. The countdown starts today. #IMFMeetings#