A “current-activity” indicator produced by Goldman Sachs, a bank, finds that after slumping in the spring, the global economy is growing nearly as fast as before Mr Trump got going (see chart 1). The JPMorgan global composite PMI, a high-frequency gauge of activity, looks strong: in August it hit a 14-month high. A real-time measure from the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta suggests that in the third quarter of 2025 America’s GDP grew by 3.9% at an annualised rate—a strong performance, though almost everyone expects the fourth quarter to be weaker. Just one OECD country, Finland, is in recession, compared with eight in early 2023. In April economists downgraded their forecasts for global economic growth in 2025 to 2.2%; now the consensus is 2.6%, where it was at the beginning of the year.
