Are there brighter prospects than at the last IMF meetings? Only just

October saw the UK chancellor in the hot seat. Now the US's Janet Yellen will face flak over green subsidies and banking security

As a spectacle, this week's half-yearly gathering of the world's finance minsters and central bank governors in Washington will be hard-pressed to come up to the standards of the last occasion they met, in October 2022.

Inflation was soaring, there were fears that the squeeze on businesses and consumers would plunge the world into recession and war was raging in Ukraine. Yet it was the UK that was the talk of the annual meetings of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank - and for all the wrong reasons.