At the event of "Boao Forum for Asia New Year Outlook 2025", Zhou Xiaochuan, former governor of the People's Bank of China, said that the world will face profound changes and challenges in 2025: the international environment will continue to be full of uncertainty, competition among major countries will intensify, and economic globalization will be frustrated; The global economic recovery is unpredictable, and the industrial chain is forced to reshape due to the decoupling and disconnection of trade and technology; The rapid development of general artificial intelligence brings opportunities and risks; The worsening climate change crisis poses a huge challenge to sustainable development. At the same time, he emphasized that there will be several major changes in 2025: the trend of accelerating the growth of countries in the global South will not change, the direction of promoting inclusive economic globalization in Asian countries will not change, and China's determination to reform and open up will not change. In his speech, Zhou Xiaochuan pointed out that the global public debt is about to exceed $100 trillion, which will increase the external financing costs and exchange rate depreciation pressure of emerging markets and developing countries. Debt poses challenges to the fiscal sustainability of developed countries. We need to be vigilant about the impact of digital encrypted assets on global financial stability and security. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) wrote in its October 2024 Fiscal Monitoring Report that global public debt has reached a high level. By the end of this year (2024), the scale of global public debt is expected to exceed $100 trillion (93% of global GDP); By 2030, it will approach 100% of GDP. This is 10 percentage points higher than that in 2019 (before the COVID-19).
