Over the past week I have crossed a radically changing North America, from Arizona to Washington DC in the US and then on to Saskatchewan in Canada, witnessing clear evidence of the consequences of historic change in the way the world economy is run. Huge uncertainty means nobody really knows where it is headed.

The walk from the White House Rose Garden to the HQ of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) takes just 9 minutes. In the past few days, in this very short stroll, two very different worlds collided with each other.

The former is the place where at the start of this month, with an extraordinary chart and questionable equation, President Trump took on the world with his so-called "reciprocal tariffs".

The latter is the place where just three weeks on from that, after rowback, market tumult, and confusion, the finance ministers of the entire world gathered to try to pick up the pieces, even as they were still rebounding off the ground.

At the IMF meetings that included gatherings of G7 and G20 members, something unique happened. The US representatives faced not open hostility, but exasperation, bewilderment and deep concern, from almost the entire rest of the world, for having sent the global economy back towards a crisis, just as it had finally emerged from four years of pandemic, war and energy shocks.