Eight must-see charts from the IMF's World Economic Outlook

1. The big story

Here are the Fund’s GDP growth projections for all the world’s major economies over the next couple of years. One chart to rule them all.

2. The story of the crisis

This very useful chart shows you the course of economic growth and contraction in various different economies around the world since the early days of the crisis. As you can see, while most major economies suffered from contraction early on in this slump, it was European countries which were most-affected in the past couple of years.

3. Any overheating?

This chart shows you how concerned (or otherwise) the Fund is about different parts of various different economies. As you can see, it’s far more worried about the US housing market than about the UK housing market.

4. Wither Europe?

A pretty useful map for eurosceptics. As you can, the countries facing the lowest growth rates tend to be euro members.

5. Tightening on the way

This chart shows you expectations for where interest rates are heading over the next few months and years. As you can see, investors expected interest rates to rise faster in all major economies – but nowhere is the jump greater than for the UK. May raise some questions over the efficacy of forward guidance, the Bank of England policy to signal where rates are heading in the future.

6. Capital outflows

The upshot of this increased expectation for early monetary tightening is that investors are pulling money out of emerging and developing economies and putting it back in the US and elsewhere. You can see the enormous outflow in this striking chart – look at the sudden, very negative bar towards the right.

7. No rebalancing

This chart is a pretty good visual representation of one of the biggest issues facing the global economy – that some countries seem to have perennial current account deficits (eg US, UK etc) and others have perennial surpluses (eg China, Germany, oil producers). Economic theory would suggest this cannot go on forever. And yet as you can see, although the differences have narrowed since the crisis, the constituent parts have not changed. The deficit countries still have deficits. The surplus countries still have surpluses. Global rebalancing, in other words, is not happening, yet.

8. Public debt since 1950

This is a great chart for economic history nuts. It shows you that the net effect of the financial crisis and Great Recession has been to increase the average indebtedness (we’re talking about government debt here) around advanced and G7 economies to the highest level since the 1950s, when countries were still burdened down by World War Two debt.