Finance ministers and central bank governors of the G20 gather in Bangkok on Thursday, under the United States presidency, alongside a G7 meeting under the French presidency and the World Bank and IMF Development Committee. The rates angle of the meeting is debt. The IMF says global public debt stands at its highest level since the Second World War and will exceed 100 percent of GDP before 2030, while debt already exceeds 100 percent of GDP in the United States, Canada, Japan, Italy and France. Developing countries face about 400 billion dollars in debt payments to external creditors in 2026.
IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva set the terms on Wednesday. She warned that the United States cannot grow its way out of mounting public debt without tax or spending changes, summarised her prescription as China needing to spend more, the United States to save more and Europe to invest more, and the Fund’s fiscal team stressed that delaying consolidation while borrowing costs are high only makes the eventual adjustment harder. Reporting of the Fund’s outlook put the US federal deficit for the fiscal year ended September 30, 2026 at above 6 percent of GDP, up from 5.8 percent in fiscal 2025, with the benchmark 10 year Treasury yield near 5.2 percent, around its highest since 2002.
The host delegation underlines the politics. US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is not attending, the second G20 finance meeting he has skipped, citing domestic engagements during the midterm campaign, and the United States is represented by Deputy Secretary Francis Brooke and the under secretary for international affairs. Australia’s Treasurer Jim Chalmers told the meeting that Australia calls for de-escalation and an end to the Middle East conflict, linking the war directly to fuel prices, inflation and interest rates at home, a connection finance ministers from energy importing Asia made repeatedly through the week, with oil above 100 dollars a barrel for most of the past eight months.
For bond markets, the meeting matters less for any communique language than for the arithmetic it is rehearsing. When the IMF tells the largest issuers, in public, that consolidation cannot wait, and the largest issuer’s finance minister is absent, investors are left pricing fiscal risk country by country. That is the backdrop against which the US sold debt this autumn at 24 year high yields, and against which Thursday’s G20 session, and Friday’s International Monetary and Financial Committee, will be read.