How the world's top economies fared last week: All you need to know

Economic policy uncertainty is at a record high globally, and the likes of Brexit and the U.S. government shutdown are adding dark clouds on the horizon

Trade-war side effects and cyclical weakness are tangled up in ugly economic data that continues to pile up across the board, while the prolonged U.S. government shutdown is making it harder to track the world’s biggest economy.

We’ll have to find a darker fairy tale as the popular-with-economists Goldilocks no longer has a place in describing this trajectory. Here’s our weekly wrap of what’s going on in the world economy.

Fighting the Slowdown

It’s a grim week in global growth when the brighter take is that Italy’s more in stagnation than recession. Elsewhere, the tone is almost universally downbeat, with an OECD gauge