Annual meetings of the International Monetary Fund usually come and go pretty much unnoticed in this part of the world, and the World Cup is of a lot more interest than the World Bank.
But this weekend's gathering of finance ministers and central bankers in Washington comes at a time when, in the words of IMF head Christine Lagarde, "We have entered a dangerous new phase of the crisis."
There is too much debt in the system, Lagarde said. "Weak growth and weak balance sheets - of governments, financial institutions and households - are feeding negatively on each other, fuelling a crisis of confidence and holding back demand, investment and job creation."
The OECD says economic growth across its members in the June quarter slowed to just 0.2 per cent and it expects growth among the G7 economies to remain at an annualised rate of less than 1 per cent over the second half of the year.
The IMF for its part forecasts growth among the advanced economies to pick up to an anaemic 2 per cent next year.
"However this assumes that European policymakers contain the crisis in the euro area periphery, that US policymakers strike a judicious balance between support for the economy and medium-term fiscal consolidation, and that volatility in financial markets does not escalate."
The risks, it says, are clearly to the downside.
Who would disagree?
Europe's leaders still show no sign at all of being able to rise to the challenge of dealing with an insolvent Greece.
And the immediate cries of "Class war!" that greeted Barack Obama's call for the richest Americans to pay tax at something closer to the same rate as the broad mass of their fellow countrymen, at a time when their Government is borrowing 40c in every dollar it spends, do not augur well for a statesmanlike resolution of the US fiscal crisis.
In this environment Bill English and Alan Bollard will no doubt be telling anyone who will listen that our government debt level is relatively low - a third of the average for advanced economies - and our banks are not exposed to dodgy European sovereign debt, and are really Australian anyway. But yesterday's data on the balance of payments and overseas debt position should remind us how vulnerable we are.
True, New Zealand's net foreign liabilities have dropped relative to the size of the economy, compared with the perilous levels we had become used to.
That is partly because the statisticians have managed to find another $11 billion of New Zealand-owned assets overseas which the statistics had not previously covered. That improvement should persist.
In addition there is a temporary $12 billion boost in claims on foreign reinsurers which have yet to be paid out.
The effect is to lower the country's net external liabilities to $140 billion or 70 per cent of GDP compared with the $160 billion and 82 per cent of GDP reported six months ago.
But that still leaves the economy lying pretty low in the water when the sea is getting distinctly choppy.
The Reserve Bank's monetary policy statement last week devoted a lot of attention to the impact Europe's sovereign debt crisis has already had in tightening up the overseas financial markets on which New Zealand banks rely for about a third of their funding.
It noted that for the big four Australian banks, which own the big four New Zealand ones, credit default swap spreads - an indicator of the perceived risk of lending to someone - had climbed to levels not seen for three years.
Right now the banks have plenty of liquidity and credit growth is weak so they have not had to turn to those markets for funding, Bollard said. Higher funding costs, flowing through to higher rates for borrowers and depositors, looked like next year's story, he said.
The silver lining in that is that the higher the risk premium banks have to pay for wholesale money, the lower the official cash rate can be, all else being equal. Indeed Bollard reminded us that unlike many of his international peers he has arithmetical scope to cut the policy rate if need be.
But he is wary of the risk that the markets seize up altogether, as they did after the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008.
If need be the bank could resort to the mechanisms it used during the global financial crisis to shore up liquidity in the New Zealand banking system, though at this stage it does not expect to have to, he said.
The financial system is not the only channel through which a sharp global slowdown would sideswipe the New Zealand economy, however.
The risk is that if Europe and the United States do slide back into recession, the export-oriented economies of Asia will be hit as well and commodity prices will tumble.
The rather plodding recovery we have had over the past couple of years has been export-led, underpinned by the strongest terms of trade for 37 years, reflecting in turn buoyant demand for the foods of affluence among the go-ahead economies of Asia.
Those economies, the IMF says in the World Economic Outlook it has just released, need to allow their currencies to rise significantly and to undertake structural reforms that reduce their high surpluses of savings over investment.
"Such policies would help improve their resilience to shocks originating in the advanced economies as well as their medium-term growth potential."
It clearly means China in particular. China's determination to allow only a gentle appreciation of its currency against the US dollar, which has in any case been weakening, is a beggar-thy-neighbour policy.
Its effect is to impose an across-the-board tax on imports into China and an across-the-board subsidy to its exports.
It deprives the Chinese people of much of the international purchasing power their labours have earned, while increasing pressure on their cost of living.
The excess savings the IMF refers to arise not because Chinese households already have all the stuff they want but because a lack of social safety nets requires high levels of precautionary savings.
And China, of course, is not the only country to be running a large current account surplus.
In 2010 Germany ran a surplus equivalent to 5.7 per cent of its GDP, China 5.2 per cent and Japan 3.6 per cent.
There is a tendency to regard such surpluses as evidence of economic virtue - industries pouring out lots of goods the rest of the world wants to buy while households are models of thrift and providence.
But it is equally valid to see them as evidence of an unwillingness to pull their weight as consumers and sources of final demand.
The deficit countries, of which New Zealand is very definitely one, need to rebalance their economies by lifting savings and exports. That process is under way here, though it is being retarded by an overvalued exchange rate.
It is mathematically impossible however for everyone to run a current account surplus.
If the deficit countries are to reduce their deficits, the surplus countries must reduce their surpluses by consuming and importing more.
No doubt the need for this global rebalancing will be raised, yet again, at the Washington meeting.
Whether it makes any difference is a lot less certain.
The Reserve Bank says no new information was disclosed in the speech.