One of the striking features of the International Monetary Fund annual meetings last week was that no one was talking about Brexit—other than the British, of course, who could talk of little else.

Among delegates from the rest of Europe, let alone the rest of the world, the subject simply didn’t arise on an agenda dominated by efforts to decipher the economic agenda of the Trump administration, assess the possible emergence of new financial bubbles and grapple with risks arising from new technologies.

...