After a series of shocks over the past five years, the global economy seemed to have stabilized—at steady but underwhelming rates, as compared with recent experience. However, the landscape has now changed. Major policy shifts have signaled a resetting of the global trading system. In early April, the US effective tariff rate jumped to levels not seen in a century. As a result, we significantly downgraded our most recent global growth projections in the April World Economic Outlook—by 0.5 percentage point for this year, from 3.3 to 2.8 percent; and 0.3 percentage point in 2026, from 3.3 to 3.0 percent. This represents the lowest global growth in approximately two decades, outside of 2020, the year of the pandemic. A natural question is: if trade tensions and uncertainty persist, what could be the impact on global growth? […]