Gillian Tett

The other issue, though, is that the tech sector is booming and driving a lot of growth.

And if you dive into the numbers right now in the American economy, you can see the capital expenditure around data centers is responsible for a lot of the actual economic growth right now overall.

And on top of that, America went into the whole Iran war with a much stronger economy that was growing faster than many other rivals.

And so as a result, it has more reserves or cushion, if you like, to protect itself.

I think we absolutely are underestimating that.

And I think the issue is, as Kristalina Georgieva, the head of the International Monetary Fund, pointed out recently, and I saw her just the other day in the IMF release report on this, that we're seeing an unbelievably uneven situation around the world right now, which frankly is very cruel.

Do you mean the K-shaped economy or something else?

Well, it's a version of the K-shaped economy, but in terms of countries.

in that, on the one hand, America still appears to be growing pretty fast, but there's a lot of other emerging market economies that are really suffering.

And, of course, Europe is in the crosshairs because not only is it facing a wave of dumping from China and competition from China on the export side, it's also dealing with a real squeeze, a nasty squeeze in terms of the energy prices, and it had a much slower pace of growth, if not economic stagnation to start with.

So in some ways, it's profoundly unfair what's going on.

Well, I didn't mean cruel in the sense of there being a deliberate war in the emerging markets economies per se at all.

It's more a case that because the Strait of Hormuz has become a key lever in this war,

in terms of how Iran is trying to stand up to America and exercise some leverage in their talks by effectively closing it.

That doesn't just hit, obviously, the energy exports, but the fertilizer and other petrochemical exports as well.

And who's going to be hit by a loss of fertilizer?

Well, yes, it will be to some degree places like America, but places like Pakistan or Bangladesh or many parts of Southeast Asia that are going to be squeezed.

And the cruelty is that these, of course, are the countries least well-equipped to actually weather it.

And what you see right now is a very interesting split between countries like China, which have been stockpiling huge amounts of spare resources and reserves of everything from fossil fuels through to fertilizer and rare earth minerals and beyond, and a place like Pakistan that has not been able to do that at all in the past few years.

One lesson is going to be, of course, that everyone now is going to go into hoarding mode.