BANGKOK — By Monday morning, the finance ministers of 190 countries will have landed at the Queen Sirikit National Convention Center, a building of such aggressive shininess that it appears to be apologizing for the water. The IMF and World Bank hold their annual meetings here starting Monday, the first time in three years the gathering has left Washington, and Thailand has done the sensible thing any host would do: it waited until the floodwater was mostly gone.
Bangkok flooded just weeks ago. Not a little. The kind of flooding that turns a motorway into a canal and a canal into a decision. And now the world’s lenders have chosen that exact city to discuss high debt levels and a Middle East war, which is either tone-deaf or the most honest venue selection in the history of finance. The people who write the loans are meeting in the place the loans got wet. Nobody has called this symbolic, but the mop bucket is right there by the podium.
By 9 a.m. Monday, the delegations will have coffee and a speech about 3 percent global growth, a number the IMF says it will barely change, the way a doctor says he will barely change the diagnosis. By noon, the debt panel will open, and a country that borrowed in dollars will explain, again, that it must now pay in dollars it no longer has, and a lender will nod with the patience of a man who has heard this in nine languages.
By evening, the delegations will board the airport express past the billboards still damp at the bottom, and the Thai foreign minister will host a dinner where the soup will be excellent and the conversation will be about soup-adjacent matters.
“I want to be clear about one thing,” said Chalermchai Wongsakul, a Bangkok shopkeeper three blocks from the convention center, whose ground floor was underwater in September and whose landlord is a fund headquartered, as it happens, in a country attending the summit. “They are meeting in my living room. I am not angry. I am just saying the room is still damp, and the men discussing the damp are the men who priced the rain.”
The IMF’s forecast for next year may edge slightly higher, which in the language of finance means the patient has stopped bleeding and is now merely expensive. The Middle East war will dominate the sessions, because the Middle East war dominates everything now, including the diesel deal that brought the world’s lenders and the world’s fuel to the same table a continent away.
Thailand has said it is honored to host. Thailand has also, in the weeks since the flood, said a number of other things about the water, the drainage budget, and the word “unprecedented,” which Thais now use the way Americans use “per my last email.” The convention center has installed new pumps. The pumps are beautiful. They are the proudest pumps in Southeast Asia, and they will run all week, and everyone in that building knows exactly what they are for.