| With less than two weeks until Election Day, it's hard to escape speculation about who might hold the White House come January. Enda Curran has his ear to the ground in Washington to hear what visiting leaders are saying. Plus: Amanda Mull on why print magazines are still valuable to advertisers and publishers, even if that value has changed. If this email was forwarded to you, click here to sign up. Like returning swallows, every year in the fall finance ministers and central bank chiefs from around the world descend on Washington to swap notes on interest rates, inflation and more, a kind of speed dating for spreadsheet nerds. Except this year. Although the official agenda at the International Monetary Fund and World Bank's annual meetings is dominated by dry policy talks, the huddled conversations and corridor discussions are all laser-focused on one issue: Donald Trump. That's because the visiting financial diplomats reckon that a win for Vice President Kamala Harris would represent policy continuity from the Biden administration and, by extension, less of a shock for the global economy. A win for former President Trump would be a whole other story given his threats to impose goods tariffs of 60% on China and as much as 20% on everyone else. The IMF has used this week's meetings to warn that the election is creating "high uncertainty" for markets and policymakers, given the sharply divergent trade priorities of the candidates.  Christine Lagarde. Photographer: Ting Shen/Bloomberg It's not that the visitors to DC are taking sides—they're at pains not to—but they're making clear their concerns, through guarded-diplomatic speak. European Central Bank Chief Christine Lagarde said whoever wins the election should beware of hurting global trade. "Periods of restrictions and barriers have not been periods of prosperity and strong leadership around the world, so whoever in this country is ultimately the president, I think, should at least bear that in mind," Lagarde said during an event Wednesday at the Atlantic Council. Germany's finance minister, Christian Lindner, had a similar message. "Every kind of trade conflict harms both sides," he told Bloomberg Television. Comments like those are a reminder that when swing voters in Wisconsin or Pennsylvania cast their ballot, it will reverberate throughout the global financial and trading system. Both Trump and Harris are statistically tied among likely voters in each of the seven swing states in the Bloomberg News/Morning Consult poll. Tim Adams, head of the Institute of International Finance, captured the conversation that's going on inside all the blacked-out SUVs with diplomatic license plates around town. When it comes to the IMF and World Bank, he says, "people are anxious because Trump has made a lot of big proposals, and what he proposes, especially for this crowd this week, is counter to the 80 years of the Bretton Woods Institutions." | 
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