On a hot day in June, the Hermann Hesse slipped into New York Harbor and headed for the Red Hook Container Terminal in Brooklyn. The 550-foot container ship, flying the Liberian flag, had come some 3,000 miles from Ecuador. It had gone through the Panama Canal, picked up cargo in the Caribbean and weathered a few squalls.

The G20's Global Infrastructure Hub and Oxford Economics have released a report that finds that the world will need nearly $100tr in infrastructure investment by 2040. This equates to nearly $4tr every year - about the same amount as the GDP of Germany.

More than a million tons of commodities normally pass through the lock on the Monongahela River in Charleroi, Pennsylvania, every month. But on a recent day, the giant steel gates that hold back the river didn't budge.