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Welcome to Howstreet.com Radio, the online source for market opinions.

Here is Jim Goddard.

My guest is James Corbett, publisher of the corbettReport.com, an editorial writer for the international forecaster.

He's speaking to us from Japan, where he's worked and lived since 2004.

Welcome back to the show, James.

Thank you for having me back on.

Always a pleasure to be here.

The IMF has come out with its economic forecast for 2019.

Any highlights that you've spotted?

Highlights or low lights? Well, it certainly does, as I think we would expect, cut back some of their

earlier forecast from earlier this year about economic growth for 2019, specifically citing

such things as the growing trade war between the

U.S. and China as a drag on global growth. So no surprise there. Interesting that it does

get specifically into cryptos, specifically the oversight and regulatory boundaries thereof,

cryptocurrency and new technologies for fintech, as they call it,

financial technology. And again, I think it should be no surprise what they say, but worth noting,

nonetheless, that one of the main things that they recommend is expanding oversight of these new

financial technologies and how they're being used.

Because of course, if you put these types of new platforms in the hands of regular people,

well, it's going to be a new speculative boom that's going to end up with a lot of tiers for a lot of people.

As I'm sure they could point to the Bitcoin bubble of the $20,000 mark that we hit last year.

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