The world order is changing but not falling apart, financial leaders said on Friday, challenging Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney's narrative that a new order is taking shape, driven by coercion from great powers, Reuters reports.
In his Davos speech, Carney urged nations to accept that the rules-based world order is over and that great powers are abandoning even the pretense of respecting international agreements.
"I don't quite share Mark's view," European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde said at the World Economic Forum in Davos, just days after Carney's appearance. "I'm not sure we should be talking about a rupture."
"I think we should be talking about alternatives. We need to identify, much more than we probably have in the past, the weaknesses, the pain points, the dependencies, the autonomy," she said.
World Trade Organization chief Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala said uncertainty was unlikely to remain as high as it was this month, when US President Donald Trump threatened to take Greenland away from NATO ally Denmark.
But the old order will not return either, uncertainty will continue and countries need to invest in their own resilience, she said.
"I don't think we will go back to where we were. But it won't be that bad and maybe we'll have a little bit of a better, more stable future," Okonjo-Iweala said.
Kristalina Georgieva, managing director of the International Monetary Fund, said the change is natural and has been happening for years, and that it's time to accept it because the shocks will continue to happen.
"We're not in Kansas anymore," she said, quoting a line from "The Wizard of Oz," meaning that the comforts of familiarity are gone forever.
Lagarde, who left a dinner in Davos amid a speech criticizing Europe by U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, was in a more condescending mood on Friday.
"We've heard a lot of criticism of Europe in the last few days, but if nothing else, we have to say "thank you" to the critics, because I think it gave us a complete awareness of the fact that we need to be more focused; we need to work on these plan Bs."