World finance leaders decried a growing populist backlash against globalisation and pledged to take steps to ensure trade and economic integration benefitted more people currently left behind.

Their comments at the start of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank autumn meetings signalled frustration with persistently low growth rates and the surge of public anger over free trade and other pillars of the global economic system.

The meetings are the first since Britain voted in June to leave the European Union and US billionaire Donald Trump secured the Republican presidential nomination with a campaign that attacked trade deals.

“More and more, people don’t trust their elites. They don’t trust their economic leaders and they don’t trust their political leaders,” German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble said during an IMF panel discussion in Washington.

“In the UK, everyone from the elites told the people, ‘don’t vote for a Brexit’. But they did.”

Schaeuble said Germany was trying to “hold Europe together” in the face of rising nationalism, and failure to do so would bode poorly for global economic cooperation.

Last week, the World Trade Organisation slashed its global trade volume growth forecast to the slowest pace since 2007, saying it expected it to rise just 1.7 per cent this year, down from the 2.8 per cent it forecast in April.

Trade has been in the main a great engine for growth

On Thursday, Latin American finance ministers also expressed concerns about growing protectionist sentiment in advanced economies that threatens to sink trade agreements such as the 12-country Trans-Pacific Partnership, which includes Mexico and Peru.

“There are isolationist trends in Europe and, sadly so, in the US,” Argentine Finance Minister Alfonso Prat-Gay told a panel during the IMF and World Bank meetings, holding out hope that cross-border investment within Latin America could still grow.

IMF managing director Christine Lagarde launched the meetings by renewing her call for countries to further boost growth by increasing spending when possible, keeping interest rates extraordinarily low and implementing pro-business reforms aimed at improving economic efficiency.

Asked to comment on the dangers to the global economy if Trump wins the White House in the November election and follows through on his pledges to renegotiate trade deals and enact punitive US tariffs, Lagarde declined to give a direct answer.

“I simply note that trade has been in the main a great engine for growth,” she said. “We need that engine in order to support and accelerate growth.”

The IMF this week kept its global growth forecast unchanged at a relatively low 3.1 per cent for 2016 and 3.4 per cent for 2017, noting that the US economy had performed worse than forecast while some emerging markets had done somewhat better.

Worries over the health of Deutsche Bank’s balance sheet cast a shadow over the meetings, with Lagarde saying Germany’s largest lender needed to re-examine its business model in an ultra-low interest rate environment.

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