This week Gillan Tett (Financial Times) describes how approach to risk is evolving under the crisis, and Ian Bremmer (Eurasia Group) calls what we are living through our first modern Depression. I find his view on how things will evolve on the geopolitical stage more interesting than trying to apply an old name to a new problem.
Is it safe to go to the shops, see a friend or get on a plane?
Gillian Tett on how to assess risk in the age of coronavirus
https://www.ft.com/content/a69afc14-904a-11ea-9b25-c36e3584cda8
Last month, Dayna Polehanki, a Michigan state senator, posted a tweet from the capitol building in Lansing that might have seemed unimaginable only recently. “Directly above me, men with rifles yelling at us,” it read, next to a picture of armed protesters standing in the building, demanding an end to the Covid-19 lockdown in the name of “freedom”. “Some of my colleagues who own bulletproof vests are wearing them.” It might be tempting to see this as just another sign of American political polarisation. But that would be a profound mistake. Over this bizarre and frightening scene hang questions that will affect us all in the coming months, be that in Lansing, London, Lagos or Lisbon: how do we define and measure risk? Who gets to do that? And who deals with the implications?
Ian Bremmer: Silver Linings in the COVID-19 Pandemic
Even though a lot of our institutions are structurally broken or eroded, the orientation and weighting of capital coming out of the COVID-19 crisis will be much more able to address and fix those problems, he said.
Bremmer also described how the crisis will affect the world’s three superpowers: the U.S., China and Europe. In the sense of the crisis, China has an advantage of being a surveillance state that can make huge, strategic investments to help the country recover economically much faster than the U.S. and Europe. But the caveat is that as China’s economy recovers, it is going to be dominant with all of the weak and poor-performing economies of the world while at the same time being decoupled from the U.S. and Europe, he said.
