World economy: 3 risks that hardly anyone talks about

IE Focus | By Ignacio de la Torre, Professor at IE Business School

The threat of a new recession in the US, the drop in the price of raw materials, and decisions taken by the ECB, might just bring about a turnaround in the world economy.

The traveler Javier Reverte once commented how when he set out on a trip to places he did not know he made a mental provision for scams, so that when a taxi driver overcharged him he didn’t get angry, given that he had already factored the “surcharge” into his provision. Now that we are over the hurdle of the recent European summit, in which for the first time political leaders adopted that old market practice of affording a false sense of happiness by means of pre-martyrdom (i.e. by lowering expectations and then subsequently announcing measures that are not quite that bad), it’s time to shed some light on other sources of basic risk for the world economy, so that we can set up our own mental provisions.  Given that I have always criticized market players for only seeing black swans in the economy, in spite of the fact that the majority of swans are white, I am going to talk about three risks – one negative, one ambivalent, and one positive, because they are the type of risks that will allow us to think that things are not really quite so bad if they do actually happen.