Image caption, The managing director of the IMF, Kristalina Georgieva, has praised the UK's approach to debt reduction. Get your fiscal health in order, is a key message at the the International Monetary Fund's (IMF) annual meeting here in Thailand. The IMF is worried about the debts of the world's biggest economies. It is doing its job as a watchdog, looking for and warning about financial vulnerabilities. In the meantime, the finance ministers of former crisis countries are boasting about how little their borrowing costs have gone up, compared to the world's biggest economies, such as the US.

Countries around the world have had their future economic prospects assessed by influential body, the International Monetary Fund (IMF). What the IMF says matters - it aims to keep the global economy stable and its twice-yearly forecasts are one of the most authoritative looks at what is really going on around the world. Yet like all forecasts they can also turn out to be incorrect, so they shouldn't be treated as gospel. Here are three things we've learnt about the UK from the IMF's latest report. The global economy has been rocked by the US-Israel war with Iran. The transportation and production of energy in the Middle East has been severely disrupted, causing oil prices to jump and inflation to rise.

Middle East and Central Asia's economy to shrink in 2026 amid war, IMF says Share Middle East and Central Asia's economy to shrink in 2026 amid war, IMF says on social media The economy of the Middle East and Central Asia is set to shrink in 2026 amid the fallout of the US-Israel war on Iran, with countries such as Kuwait and Qatar facing double-digit contractions, according to the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The region's gross domestic product (GDP) is forecast to contract by 0.3 percent this year, a sharp downgrade from the 1.9 percent expansion projected in April, the IMF said in its latest economic outlook on Tuesday. Kuwait, Iraq and Qatar are forecast to have the most severe economic contractions, with their GDPs expected to shrink by 16.7 percent, 16 percent and 15.6 percent, respectively. Bahrain's GDP is forecast to contract by 11.3 percent, while Iran's economy is projected to shrink by 7.6 percent. Saudi Arabia, which has partially offset the hit to its energy sector by boosting oil exports through the East-West pipeline, is projected to record negative growth of 3.3 percent.

The IMF underlined the interconnected nature of big AI companies, and the high levels of borrowing being undertaken to fund investment in the sector. The IMF underlined the interconnected nature of big AI companies, and the high levels of borrowing being undertaken to fund investment in the sector. IMF warns global economy'could soon test the limits of resilience' The threat of an AI share price crash rippling out across global markets is putting world financial stability at risk, the International Monetary fund has warned. In its twice-yearly Global Financial Stability Report, the IMF highlighted the sky-high valuations for AI companies along with their increasing debt pile as one reason that risks in the system are "elevated". "The consequences of an AI correction could be global," it warned.

This paper builds a hierarchy of explicit, non-asymptotic tail bounds for the supremum of the Kostlan--Shub--Smale (KSS) random field on the sphere, and applies it to two problems: Spiked Tensor PCA and the landscape of the spherical $k$-spin model. For Tensor PCA, we study the non-asymptotic statistical limits of estimating a rank-$R$ symmetric signal tensor of order~$k\ge 3$ and dimension~$d\ge 3$ from a single Gaussian observation at signal-to-noise ratio~$λ$, through the \emph{profile maximum likelihood estimator}, the MLE restricted to normalized rank-$R$ tensors of coherence at least~$κ$. Our analysis uses a single reduction: a deterministic geometric inequality (the Tube Method) and a rank-reduction step bound the estimation error by the supremum of the canonical KSS field, which the Kac--Rice formula turns into a Gaussian integral against the expected absolute characteristic polynomial of a shifted Gaussian Orthogonal Ensemble, controlled in turn by the four explicit tail bounds of our hierarchy (three from a Mehta--Fyodorov representation, one from a Ben Arous--Dembo--Guionnet large deviation). The same reduction yields two results, each with explicit constants. For estimation, a finite-$(k,d)$ error bound recovers the asymptotically optimal rate~$\sqrt{d\log k}$ of Perry, Wein and Bandeira, with explicit dependence on the rank~$R$ and the coherence~$κ$. For the landscape, a two-sided non-asymptotic bracketing of the annealed complexity of the spherical $k$-spin Hamiltonian recovers the Auffinger--Ben Arous--Černý complexity function in the high-dimensional limit.

The Schrödinger Bridge (SB) problem offers a powerful framework for combining optimal transport and diffusion models. A promising recent approach to solve the SB problem is the Iterative Markovian Fitting (IMF) procedure, which alternates between Markovian and reciprocal projections of continuous-time stochastic processes. However, the model built by the IMF procedure has a long inference time due to using many steps of numerical solvers for stochastic differential equations. To address this limitation, we propose a novel Discrete-time IMF (D-IMF) procedure in which learning of stochastic processes is replaced by learning just a few transition probabilities in discrete time. Its great advantage is that in practice it can be naturally implemented using the Denoising Diffusion GAN (DD-GAN), an already well-established adversarial generative modeling technique. We show that our D-IMF procedure can provide the same quality of unpaired domain translation as the IMF, using only several generation steps instead of hundreds.

Georgieva said that AI would wipe out many roles traditionally taken up by younger workers. Georgieva said that AI would wipe out many roles traditionally taken up by younger workers. Young will suffer most when AI'tsunami' hits jobs, says head of IMF Artificial intelligence will be a "tsunami hitting the labour market", with young people worst affected, the head of the International Monetary Fund warned the World Economic Forum on Friday. Kristalina Georgieva told delegates in Davos that the IMF's own research suggested there would be a big transformation of demand for skills, as the technology becomes increasingly widespread. "We expect over the next years, in advanced economies, 60% of jobs to be affected by AI, either enhanced or eliminated or transformed - 40% globally," she said.

President Trump's favourite word is tariffs. He reminded the world of that in his pre-Christmas address to the nation. With the world still unwrapping the tariffs gift from the first year of his second term in office, he said they were bringing jobs, higher wages and economic growth to the US. What is less debatable is that they've refashioned the global economy, and will continue to do so into 2026. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) says that although the tariff shock is smaller than originally announced, it is a key reason why it now expects the rate of global economic growth to slow to 3.1% in 2026.

This study proposes a hybrid deep learning model for forecasting the price of Bitcoin, as the digital currency is known to exhibit frequent fluctuations. The models used are the Variational Mode Decomposition (VMD) and the Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) network. First, VMD is used to decompose the original Bitcoin price series into Intrinsic Mode Functions (IMFs). Each IMF is then modeled using an LSTM network to capture temporal patterns more effectively. The individual forecasts from the IMFs are aggregated to produce the final prediction of the original Bitcoin Price Series. To determine the prediction power of the proposed hybrid model, a comparative analysis was conducted against the standard LSTM. The results confirmed that the hybrid VMD+LSTM model outperforms the standard LSTM across all the evaluation metrics, including RMSE, MAE and R2 and also provides a reliable 30-day forecast.

What is the Insurrection Act? Is Trump trying to dial back tensions with Brazil? Why was Letitia James indicted? Will a government shutdown hurt the economy? The United States's artificial intelligence (AI) investment boom might be an economic bubble that could burst, comparable to the dot-com bust in the early 2000s, according to the International Monetary Fund.