Why do babies cry when they are born? Because they have just become responsible for their share of the national debt. In the western world, on average, this can be more than £30,000. That is enough to drive anyone to tears.

The International Monetary Fund's annual meetings are on this week in Washington and one issue will be on everybody's mind: that the weakening global recovery may turn the global debt problem into a major crisis. Alarm bells have been sounded by the latest report in the Geneva series by the International Centre for Monetary and Banking Studies, written by economists Luigi Buttiglione, Philip Lane, Lucrezia Reichlin and Vincent Reinhart and published last month.