Each year the International Monetary Fund and World Bank hold meetings in the spring and the fall to discuss global poverty reduction, economic growth and development, and exchange rate stability.

These meetings -- along with G7 summits and World Trade Organization Ministerial meetings -- have been the sites of choice for anti-globalization protesters. In the last several years, Washington, D.C. police cordoned off huge areas of the city to all traffic, made mass arrests and imported extra police assistance from Maryland, Delaware, Virginia and Pennsylvania.

But the meetings planned for this spring (April 24-25) seem to have attracted little attention, and the world's leading economists and financiers may regain the obscurity and general disinterest in their work that gave these institutions such a free hand in the past.

Why have the anti-globalization protesters given up? Their antics and civil disobedience in the street, their homage to Vietnam-era-like concerns for human rights and global diversity and their rage against a global corporate ethic and the homogenization of nations and peoples attracted enormous global media attention.

One time when I saw a friend who headed the non-governmental organization Ozone Action walk by, I held up my wrists together as if they were handcuffed; my friend signaled two fingers from the other side of the glass in a Starbucks coffee shop, meaning that he had been arrested twice.

His face showed that he was thrilled to have been taken to jail to protest what he believed was the tyranny of global government. But the fact is that protesters now care less about the globalization juggernaut because globalization itself has been put on hold, at least temporarily.

Globalization and the increasingly frictionless global flow of people, money, companies and ideas depend upon a high-trust dynamic in the world: Trust must be high; fear must be low. But today we have a high-fear, low-trust world -- and nations, their governments, and the paranoia of security-concerned citizens are hardening borders and making globalization a tougher vision to achieve.

On one front, protesters of globalization and the institutions that promote this global culture have less about which to protest.

On another, the developing world's growth had previously stalled -- and Japan and Europe seemed still stalled -- with only the U.S. economy growing in any sustained and major way (the one major exception being China). Practically the entire world is now growing, and the global economic recovery seems to be sound and widespread. Even the anemic Japanese economy seems to finally be moving from malaise to a new economic perkiness. The world looks less likely to collapse if the U.S. economy slows or if there is a shock of some kind elsewhere in the world. Thus, the world is growing but is subject to a high-fear dynamic operating to take some of the edge off of the globalization rhetoric.

In a recent private meeting, some senior IMF officials shared that while the world has some significant risks to worry about -- including America's large current account deficit, rising energy prices, a potential global real estate bubble and the overheating of China's turbo-charged economy -- on the whole, most other factors look good. Special mention was made of Japan finally growing and getting to a position where deflation looked like it was increasingly under control. The rest of the developing world also seems to be growing; a lot of the world's developing nations have worked to get bad debt pushed aside or forgiven.

Perhaps the most important indicator of the IMF's confidence in the state of the global economy is it's position that the "loose money" policies currently being pursued by the world's most important economies -- including the United States, Japan and Europe -- need to be tightened up and that the monetary tools these nations are using to stimulate demand and consumption have probably been overstretched in recent years. The view of the IMF leadership was that these "tools" need to be "reacquired and fixed," which is a complicated way of saying that interest rates, globally, would soon be moving up -- even in Japan -- but hopefully not so much as to damage the global economic recovery.

The messy quagmire America has found itself in Iraq may have distracted the attention of globally concerned protesters. But the issue of how global growth is managed and whether it is sustainable and shared is probably one of the most important issues affecting global security and stability today. While the world is not overanalyzing every move that the IMF and World Bank are making today, the leading nations managing these institutions -- particularly the United States, Japan, Germany, Britain and France -- need to get the developing nation problem right and need to develop better strategies to help the poor nations of the world succeed. This will help restore a high-trust/low-fear world, steal the global audience away from terrorists -- and even satisfy the protesters.