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The End of the Predictable World: Forecasting a World in Turmoil · Global Insights

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_03: Inside the world's biggest companies, there's now a job that barely existed 10 years ago.
• 0:05
  SPEAKER_03: Predicting the next global crisis before it hits.
• 0:09
  SPEAKER_02: Putin could this year, he could tomorrow, he could anytime this year or next year, stage a significant provocation in the Baltics, and the American president could dither and delay, and there could be a significant question as to whether the U.S.
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_02: is credible in upholding the collective security of NATO.
• 0:27
  SPEAKER_03: The shocks keep coming.
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_03: A pandemic that shut everything down, Russia's war in Ukraine, tariffs that appear one morning and vanish the next.
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_03: But the decisions can't wait.
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_03: A company picks where to build, which market to bet on, who to trust.
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_03: And one move in Washington or Beijing can wreck all of it overnight.
• 0:49
  SPEAKER_01: Countries in Europe and in Asia are increasingly changing their foreign policies, how they interact with other countries, and how they therefore impact supply chains and business decisions based on partisan political swings that change very quickly and that give business a lot of whiplash.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_03: Nobody can tell you what the next year holds.
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_03: So how do you tell real danger from noise?
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_01: How do you plan for a world no one can predict?
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_01: People maybe read the news a little too much and don't actually look at kind of the long-term trends.
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_02: But the thing is, geopolitics, by definition, moves at a glacial pace.
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_01: We used to call this, you know, the liberal international order, and we are moving towards a system that is slightly less liberal, no less international, but significantly more disorderly.
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_03: This is Global Insights by Network 2020.
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_03: Today, navigating risk in a new world disorder.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_03: Joining us today is Matt Gurkin of BCA Research, who forecasts how politics moves markets, and Pablo Rasmussen of Brzezinski Global Strategies, who advises companies on political risk in Europe.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_03: Moderating today's conversation is Joanna Gwavchetsky.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_00: So Matt, if I can begin with you to kind of set the scene, could you please define what is meant by geopolitical risk and how, in general, do companies assess risk?
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_02: Well, thank you very much, Joanna.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_02: I think that risk is what you know the chance or the probability that something happens outside of our expectations or that disrupts or disappoints our expectations.
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_02: And we try to quantify risks.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_02: Risks ideally and typically are thought of as something that is quantifiable.
• 2:45
  SPEAKER_02: But we also have uncertainties, things that we cannot quantify, and they can be disrupting our expectations as well.
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_02: Companies in general have long developed techniques for assessing the financial and operational and strategic risks that they face.
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_02: But the fact that they had a sort of illusion of global peace and prosperity throughout the 1990s and 2000s created a generation of corporate leaders who expected that the global trajectory would be one of increasing globalization and trade and cooperation.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_02: And that is the primary disappointment that we're facing today, because the United States has competition with other powers.
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_02: Some of them are economic powers and technological powers like China, which can maintain a long-run competition with the U.S.
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_02: And that competition may not always be friendly, you know.
• 3:39
  SPEAKER_02: And of course, increasingly we've seen that it can bleed into military and strategic insecurity, which then leads to cooperation being shattered in different domains and the willingness to use tools in competition that are aggressive and ultimately can escalate.
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_02: And that's something that the, of course, that East Asian countries face is a very significant challenge.
• 4:05
  SPEAKER_02: And so their companies have to plan around that and they have to start to assess risk in a different way than they did previously.
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_02: But the United States itself is a disruptive actor.
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_02: So it's not just the competition between countries, it's also the way that their domestic politics create internal competition, changes in policy.
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_02: And this can be this can be especially disruptive for neighbors or for countries that they're closely tied to when they change policy abruptly, when they vacillate.
• 4:34
  SPEAKER_02: Again, the US has been exemplifying this with disruption disruptive behavior recently.
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_02: But of course, uh, Russia and China also exemplify this kind of disruptive approach to the international system.
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_02: But then, of course, you have all kinds of lower-level risks that are beneath the question of the global political structure, but they do affect different countries, they affect different regions, they affect different companies.
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_02: And ultimately, in the work that I do, and I'll conclude, financial risk is something that's extremely important because what we see is that there's a dynamic between the economy, the real economy, the policymakers, and the asset markets.
• 5:12
  SPEAKER_02: And policymakers cannot afford to ignore asset markets any more than, as we've seen, President Trump can afford to ignore the stock market reaction to tariffs or the oil market reaction to operations in Iran.
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_02: And that leads to some very interesting uh sets of risks.
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_02: Although, of course, it's only one category.
• 5:32
  SPEAKER_02: Operational supply chain risks have become very salient in recent years.
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_00: Great.
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you so much.
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_00: And now turning to Pablo.
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_00: As I had previously mentioned, we're seeing this dramatic shift in the international rule-based order to the still yet unknown.
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_00: Do you think the current environment for assessing risk is much different than in past decades?
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_00: And in what way?
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, well, first of all, thank you to Courtney, to Joanna, and to Brian and to the Network 2020 team for having us here.
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_01: It's really exciting and it's an important and timely conversation.
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_01: I think the environment has certainly changed in that there's a lot more enthusiasm for the kind of work that Matt and I do to assess this kind of risk.
• 6:14
  SPEAKER_01: Um, not only to assess it, but to also overcome it.
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_01: However, the methodology is maybe still struggling to catch up to the reality.
• 6:22
  SPEAKER_01: I think one, it is difficult to price this risk, right?
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_01: I think there are experts and investors, everything from legal counsel to lobbyists uh integrated within companies that are kind of seeking out ways to absorb more information about the kind of geopolitical risk that they're facing.
• 6:41
  SPEAKER_01: But there is yet to be kind of a truly market-wide way to absorb and price this risk, understanding really the price implications for particular national security decisions that are being made.
• 6:53
  SPEAKER_01: We see some of this in the semiconductor space, but it's still in the early stages.
• 6:57
  SPEAKER_01: I think maybe more broadly, the current environment is one that, as Matt alluded to, we used to call this, you know, the liberal international order, and we are moving towards a system that is slightly less liberal, no less international, but significantly more disorderly.
• 7:13
  SPEAKER_01: And that is the real challenge is that without both the kind of open market focus that existed beforehand, and also without a kind of consensus model, and never there was never a full, perfect consensus, but one that was still pretty dominant, it creates a lot of chaos that is still very hard to calculate.
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_01: And I think the last thing that I want to echo that Matt mentioned, which is really important, is kind of the growing rule of domestic politics over how countries play in the international sphere.
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_01: We used to have this lovely phrase about uh water, about politics stopping at the water's edge, that is very much not the case.
• 7:53
  SPEAKER_01: And countries, not just the US as a disruptive actor, but countries in Europe and in Asia are increasingly changing their foreign policies, how they interact with other countries, and how they therefore impact supply chains and business decisions based on partisan political swings that change very quickly and that give business a lot of whiplash.
• 8:14
  SPEAKER_01: And we still don't have a really robust way of calculating this.
• 8:18
  SPEAKER_01: Most of the work is reactive, not proactive.
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_01: And that still needs to change for companies not to kind of get caught in the headwinds.
• 8:26
  SPEAKER_00: So, do you think that like personalities play a bigger role at this point in time in history, would you say?
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_01: Sure, not just personalities, but actually maybe domestic political economy, right?
• 8:37
  SPEAKER_01: How do I think US for like international economic policy over the last few years has been really defined by how particularly incumbent votering blocks that are really influential, from trade unions focused on kind of the car industry in the United States to farm workers influencing North American trade, to a lot of these discussions about deindustrialization and the China shock, which we can get into, how those have affected the political dynamics in the United States and therefore how that is affecting foreign policy, right?
• 9:11
  SPEAKER_01: And this is happening everywhere.
• 9:13
  SPEAKER_01: Go ahead, Matt.
• 9:14
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, one thing to think about with personalities, um, because it's a it's a good question.
• 9:18
  SPEAKER_02: And we are sort of in a moment in which the big man or the strong man theory of history is uh reascending.
• 9:27
  SPEAKER_02: And we see that with some of, you know, with Vladimir Putin or Xi Jinping or or arguably Donald Trump.
• 9:33
  SPEAKER_02: Sometimes the news media exaggerates this.
• 9:36
  SPEAKER_02: So all of us can remember, you know, the cover of foreign affairs when they included people like Victor Orban in that category, and yet all it takes is one election to remove a leader in a democratic country.
• 9:47
  SPEAKER_02: So we have to be careful who we categorize as a true strong man.
• 9:51
  SPEAKER_02: But the truth is that in history, there haven't been very many periods where constitutional rule was dominant in most of the leading powers.
• 10:02
  SPEAKER_02: So there was a glimpse of it after the Soviet Union fell, but it really was just a glimpse of a period in which the constitutional uh rule was dominant.
• 10:11
  SPEAKER_02: And in fact, narratives that stressed the institutionalization of governance in places like China were exaggerated.
• 10:18
  SPEAKER_02: There never was an institutional succession of power in China or a peaceful transition process.
• 10:24
  SPEAKER_02: And it was temporarily, there was Deng Xiaoping set up a system where he could have sort of a 10-year transfer of power, but Zhang Zemin held on to the military for an extra two years.
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_02: So that means that Hu Jintao was the only Chinese leader to actually adhere to this 10-year period.
• 10:43
  SPEAKER_02: And of course, we've seen Xi Jinping remove term limits.
• 10:46
  SPEAKER_02: Now, that is the, and I'm just using that as an example.
• 10:49
  SPEAKER_02: It's once you monkey with term limits, then you start to create uncertainty about how power will be transferred and you increase the probability of significant domestic struggle, which can then have international implications or domestic economic implications.
• 11:04
  SPEAKER_02: So the point is that we live in a system, we've always lived in a political system in which individual leaders are constantly contending with domestic institutional forces.
• 11:15
  SPEAKER_02: If you're lucky, you create a constitutional order that can endure through different generations.
• 11:20
  SPEAKER_02: But we've never had a period where the world system as a whole had all the major powers aligned on a constitutional structure.
• 11:27
  SPEAKER_02: Nevertheless, we see that presidents will increasingly attempt an imperial presidency and will increasingly engage in a struggle with the constitutional structure.
• 11:38
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks so much for those points.
• 11:40
  SPEAKER_00: They're fascinating, especially about the constitutional leadership not aligning across the great powers.
• 11:47
  SPEAKER_00: The next question is for both of you, and I'll start with you, Matt.
• 11:51
  SPEAKER_00: Where geographically do you see the greatest shifts in risk and in which industries?
• 11:57
  SPEAKER_02: Well, yeah, I've referred to China twice, and I do that for a reason because we want to be to in order to improve our risk analysis and our geopolitical risk analysis, we need to be forward-looking.
• 12:09
  SPEAKER_02: So we want to combine quantitative and qualitative methods.
• 12:13
  SPEAKER_02: We want to be probabilistic, we want to be data dependent, nonpartisan, but we also want to be forward-looking.
• 12:20
  SPEAKER_02: And that means that we have to, as difficult as it can be, we have to separate ourselves from some urgent issues, for example, Russia's war on Ukraine and look to the forward.
• 12:31
  SPEAKER_02: Now, when we do that, what we see is that the peer competitor of the United States, or maybe near-peer competitor, depending on your view, would be China.
• 12:39
  SPEAKER_02: That's because they can combine technological innovation and industrial capacity with their strategic ambitions.
• 12:48
  SPEAKER_02: And in particular, because of the degradation of the Russian economy, which is a remorseless process happening over decades, and you know more about it than I do, Joanna.
• 12:57
  SPEAKER_02: But that process of the degradation of the Russian economy subordinates Russia to some degree to China within Eurasia and creates a context in which China will have greater access over time to cheaper resources and raw materials.
• 13:13
  SPEAKER_02: And that means that the United States faces, and you can say this in a neutral fashion, not necessarily cheering for the United States, but simply that the United States, as the world's leading actor, faces a geopolitical nightmare, which is the potential for a united Eurasian political block or economic block.
• 13:31
  SPEAKER_02: And in that case, China can challenge and compete with the US for an extended period of time.
• 13:41
  SPEAKER_02: Now, that means that the neighbors of China become the zone, the sh the sort of shatter belt and the zone of risk or the zone of change.
• 13:50
  SPEAKER_02: And that means that companies have to be especially attentive there.
• 13:54
  SPEAKER_02: Now, this is really obvious with Taiwan and the semiconductor industry, but you can even expand that logic to what's happening in the Middle East.
• 14:01
  SPEAKER_02: Because if you think about a Eurasian bloc taking shape, an important question would be: would Russia and China have the capability of supporting a powerful state, say a nuclear armed state in the Middle East that could then become a sphere of influence aligned with that Eurasian bloc.
• 14:17
  SPEAKER_02: That's what Iran could have been.
• 14:19
  SPEAKER_02: It very likely will not be.
• 14:22
  SPEAKER_02: But as a result of the Americans reasserting their sphere of influence in the Middle East, America now has new costs and consequences.
• 14:29
  SPEAKER_02: And meanwhile, uh we have a disruption in the Middle East.
• 14:33
  SPEAKER_02: So, long story short, it's generally speaking, it's the US-China competition that should be the driver here.
• 14:40
  SPEAKER_02: But the subordination of Russia to China creates a more capable China over the long run.
• 14:46
  SPEAKER_02: And that creates a greater risk for countries on the periphery, which can extend from Ukraine through the Middle East and especially into Southeast Asia.
• 14:55
  SPEAKER_00: And that's that's fairly alarming to hear, but uh it makes sense.
• 15:00
  SPEAKER_00: So now, Pablo, the same question to you.
• 15:02
  SPEAKER_00: Where do you see the greatest shifts in risk and which industries?
• 15:07
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and I'll start kind of with the region that is my personal bread and butter, which is which is focusing on Europe.
• 15:12
  SPEAKER_01: And there I see an enormous, there is a very quickly and rapidly changing shift in the relative power and influence and economic capacity of Western Europe versus Eastern Europe.
• 15:25
  SPEAKER_01: And I'll define that a little bit more in a second.
• 15:28
  SPEAKER_01: Western Europe is facing enormous economic headwinds.
• 15:31
  SPEAKER_01: It is facing effectively a political crisis on a regular basis with the right rise of the far right, with basically unsustainable fiscal positions in places like France and Italy.
• 15:44
  SPEAKER_01: That has created a growing opportunity for the booming economies in Eastern Europe and not just kind of your Poland's and Czech republics, but also including to some degree the Baltics.
• 15:53
  SPEAKER_01: And I would couple the Nordics in that, which have become huge engines for innovation.
• 15:59
  SPEAKER_01: They're actually major players in the technology sphere, unlike their Western European counterparts.
• 16:05
  SPEAKER_01: That shift eastward in Europe is lagging in the political sphere, and particularly in the political sphere within the European Union, but it is really, really becoming quite noticeable in the economics.
• 16:18
  SPEAKER_01: This, however, is partially affected by, as Matt alluded to, the relationship that Europe is having with China.
• 16:24
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that that is, you know, even from an American position, something that we should really be concerned about.
• 16:30
  SPEAKER_01: China is increasingly focusing the exports that it is not sending to the United States, to Europe.
• 16:37
  SPEAKER_01: The effect that we, that all of us that are living in the United States, got to see of the political ramifications of shifting a lot of industry to China is going to happen in Europe next.
• 16:48
  SPEAKER_01: The German car manufacturing industry is in borderland collapse.
• 16:52
  SPEAKER_01: They've been unable to keep up competition.
• 16:55
  SPEAKER_01: Chinese cars are increasingly the fastest growing uh industrial sector in Europe.
• 17:00
  SPEAKER_01: Um, this also applies to chemicals, um, to a vast majority of manufactured goods and engineering parts.
• 17:10
  SPEAKER_01: So this is changing the dynamic in Europe, and therefore it is changing the nature of the US alliance, right?
• 17:17
  SPEAKER_01: The Chinese economy is larger than the US, depends how you measure it, but it is.
• 17:21
  SPEAKER_01: Um, the combined US-European one is not.
• 17:24
  SPEAKER_01: And and that, but the risk continues to be there.
• 17:27
  SPEAKER_01: So I think this is what we're contending with.
• 17:29
  SPEAKER_01: This is what a lot of companies are asking with.
• 17:31
  SPEAKER_01: There are areas of growth and opportunity.
• 17:33
  SPEAKER_01: There's huge potential for manufacturing.
• 17:36
  SPEAKER_01: Europe is trying to build up its defense industrial base.
• 17:38
  SPEAKER_01: It is struggling.
• 17:39
  SPEAKER_01: It is aiming to kind of replace what is now going and being offshore to China, becoming defense.
• 17:45
  SPEAKER_01: I think that's has macro risks that are really important to take into account.
• 17:50
  SPEAKER_01: But there is huge shift in opportunity in that region, and that will have reappropriations globally, as Europe still, you know, remains also large investors in the world, big parts of global supply chains that are really, really being affected by what is called the China Shock 2.0, um, which is mostly directed towards Europe.
• 18:08
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you.
• 18:09
  SPEAKER_00: Just something I wanted to uh follow up on with you, Pablo, and something that Matt had mentioned about Asia allies.
• 18:15
  SPEAKER_00: What uh how is this impacting America's allies in Asia?
• 18:20
  SPEAKER_01: So they are somewhat better prepared to face the China shock than Europe is.
• 18:26
  SPEAKER_01: Both there is a general economic security policy mindscape that is much more developed than in Europe.
• 18:33
  SPEAKER_01: There also is a bit of a numbers game.
• 18:35
  SPEAKER_01: Europe is 20-something countries, depending on how you measure it.
• 18:39
  SPEAKER_01: Our Asian allies are fewer, and and their political landscapes are much more tuned to the threat from China.
• 18:46
  SPEAKER_01: Parts of European governments, European leaders will consistently say that they see mainly China as a friendly trading partner.
• 18:53
  SPEAKER_01: That is not really the case anymore if you look at their the industry.
• 18:57
  SPEAKER_01: That's not necessarily been the case in Asia as much.
• 19:00
  SPEAKER_01: I think there's just a bigger awareness of the demand of security.
• 19:03
  SPEAKER_01: But also, our East Asian allies do face economic headwinds as well, and are really will also be affected by some of these shocks.
• 19:11
  SPEAKER_01: And I think at this time is where you would need a serious effort towards allied coordination for this, probably led by the United States, to really enable an allied scale for how to address joint common tighter supply chains among allies, particularly in the defense sector, particularly concerning critical minerals and all of these things.
• 19:31
  SPEAKER_02: I'll just tag on here to say that I do think also it's helpful for us to remember we were, and maybe we should have defined this at the beginning, but geopolitics is this really huge umbrella term.
• 19:42
  SPEAKER_02: And both Pablo and I, you can tell, we're referring to both domestic politics and international relations.
• 19:48
  SPEAKER_02: So, what that means is that, for example, North America continues to be a continent of opportunity.
• 19:54
  SPEAKER_02: You have domestic political struggle taking place in the United States, but you still have relatively robust population growth, mostly because of immigration.
• 20:03
  SPEAKER_02: But immigration has not been permanently stopped.
• 20:06
  SPEAKER_02: It's been temporarily constrained by an administration.
• 20:09
  SPEAKER_02: So as long as the rule of law continues the change in administrations, you can have a change in the waxing and waning in immigration policy.
• 20:16
  SPEAKER_02: But also Canada and Mexico are huge opportunities because they benefit from that growing innovative American economy, but they also have large resources.
• 20:25
  SPEAKER_02: In Mexico's case, labor that can be upgraded, and in Canada's case, resource, you know, metals, minerals.
• 20:32
  SPEAKER_02: Australia, uh, we've we haven't really talked about Latin America, but what we see generally is that in an environment where countries are less secure and concerned about choke points and chokeholds and international conflict, they have to engage in spending programs that are, you know, that involve government funding, but also private sector that will increase their security.
• 20:55
  SPEAKER_02: It can be defense, but it can also be energy security, it can be industrial strategy.
• 21:00
  SPEAKER_02: That's going to require them to build systems that require those resources.
• 21:06
  SPEAKER_02: And so if you're in Latin America and you're selling metals, then you're going to be a geopolitical opportunity at the very moment when, for example, in the Middle East, we see an increase in insecurity and supply constraint.
• 21:19
  SPEAKER_02: But then the opportunity falls to outlying places that are more secure because of their distance and maybe more secure because of the business that they can do.
• 21:27
  SPEAKER_02: So that's Latin America, that's South Africa, that's Australia.
• 21:31
  SPEAKER_02: And ultimately, North America really has some huge advantages there because they combine the technology with the resource.
• 21:38
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you.
• 21:39
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you so much.
• 21:40
  SPEAKER_00: Now I've got one final question.
• 21:42
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so the next question is again for both of you, and I'll start with you, Pablo.
• 21:45
  SPEAKER_00: How can company how can companies best hedge their bets specifically given this new volatility?
• 21:52
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I mean, I think one is that increasingly you just need to be aware of geopolitics.
• 21:59
  SPEAKER_01: I think The largest kind of the Fortune 500 class of companies, as well as, you know, most of the large institutional investors are now very, very dedicated to following geopolitics and their supply chains.
• 22:12
  SPEAKER_01: That is costly, admittedly, although I think that some of the costs will continue to just come down as this kind of industry scales up.
• 22:22
  SPEAKER_01: The other thing that is really important is not to also overstate the amount of political risk.
• 22:27
  SPEAKER_01: I think that it is really important to realize that while it is, while companies should be aware of the risks that they're facing, they shouldn't be holding off on making risky investments in places that are actually have an enormous amount of potential.
• 22:44
  SPEAKER_01: If you would have said at the beginning of the war in Ukraine that the four or five fastest growing economies in Europe border Ukraine, you would have thought that is crazy.
• 22:54
  SPEAKER_01: Since when does a country that is actively under security risk, the fastest growing?
• 23:01
  SPEAKER_01: It's very rare in history, if you look at it, but partially because of the security of NATO, partially because of the coordination among allies, but partially because there is a lot of dynamism that comes from the people that have left Ukraine and moved to Poland and are bolstering those economies.
• 23:18
  SPEAKER_01: So I agree with Matt that immigration is going to continue being a very touchy issue.
• 23:22
  SPEAKER_01: It is also still a source of like economic dynamism.
• 23:25
  SPEAKER_01: So if you stay away too much from kind of a superficial analysis of risk and not realize that the greater the risk, the greater the reward in some cases, the then you are also missing out on enormous investment possibilities, enormous growth.
• 23:38
  SPEAKER_01: You can see this in the Caucasus, you can see this in, you know, even parts of the Middle East that are still going to become that are very innovative, that are become going to, after the current crisis, probably become large hubs for defense innovation that is currently happening in Europe and in places like Taiwan.
• 23:56
  SPEAKER_01: Certain amount of risk has to also be tolerated in order to make good business investments.
• 24:01
  SPEAKER_01: I think as important it is to be aware of it, it also is important to not be overly risk-averse.
• 24:06
  SPEAKER_00: Great.
• 24:07
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you, Pablo.
• 24:08
  SPEAKER_00: And then Matt, you know, how would hedge the debts?
• 24:10
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 24:11
  SPEAKER_02: Well, first of all, I think what Pablo said is excellent.
• 24:13
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, it it there's a tendency for all of us, but especially in the geopolitical risk sphere, because we're talking about risk, we will overweight the negative the negative factors, the negative variables.
• 24:27
  SPEAKER_02: Um, so in other words, what you need to do to hedge risk, because it's always going to depend on your own situation, whether you're a company or an individual.
• 24:37
  SPEAKER_02: But scenario analysis is extremely important.
• 24:40
  SPEAKER_02: That means you have to be able to clearly and um clearly articulate different scenarios as they would apply concretely and materially to your interests.
• 24:52
  SPEAKER_02: And then you need to put numerical estimates to those scenarios.
• 24:57
  SPEAKER_02: And that's a part that people have for many, many years uh hesitated to do.
• 25:02
  SPEAKER_02: Because what they're worried about is the idea of a species precision, where you put, you know, you say there's a 78% probability of an oil shock this year because the US and Israel could attack Iran.
• 25:15
  SPEAKER_02: And people say, well, 78%, how could you possibly be so precise?
• 25:20
  SPEAKER_02: The issue is that you're going to do a little bit of math, you're going to do a little bit of guesswork, you might do some game theory, you might look at frequency probabilities, like how often things have happened in the past.
• 25:31
  SPEAKER_02: But the point is you're going to come up with the best numerical estimate that you can come up with.
• 25:36
  SPEAKER_02: And even though it won't be perfect, and we all know that it won't be right, it's better to have those numbers tied to your scenarios than to have just vague terminology, because terminology can be all over the place.
• 25:49
  SPEAKER_02: When someone says that something is somewhat likely, some people think that that means there's a 10% chance.
• 25:54
  SPEAKER_02: Other people think that means there's a 40% chance.
• 25:57
  SPEAKER_02: And that's the same thing, somewhat likely.
• 25:59
  SPEAKER_02: So we got to get away from the terms.
• 26:01
  SPEAKER_02: We've got to be, we've got to be willing to have the conviction in our analysis.
• 26:05
  SPEAKER_02: And that's probably why you do need a geopolitical risk expert or some kind of risk expert to provide a quantitative analysis, even if they're incorporating qualitative elements in that.
• 26:16
  SPEAKER_02: They're going to provide a number, they're going to put it on the scenario.
• 26:19
  SPEAKER_02: And then once you have your scenarios and you're assuming all throughout this that the actors, all the actors, are rational actors.
• 26:26
  SPEAKER_02: That's important.
• 26:28
  SPEAKER_02: Now you can have any number of things happen.
• 26:31
  SPEAKER_02: Maybe one actor will prove not to be rational.
• 26:34
  SPEAKER_02: Maybe your assessment was, you know, too rosy.
• 26:38
  SPEAKER_02: There's different ways in which it'll change, but you have a paper trail, you have a clear and structured argument.
• 26:44
  SPEAKER_02: Others have been able to critique that argument.
• 26:46
  SPEAKER_02: It's all right there.
• 26:48
  SPEAKER_02: And the amount of improvement that you can have from multiple people externalizing an analysis and looking at it transparently is priceless.
• 26:56
  SPEAKER_02: So I think the key, so that now that will teach you how to hedge your risk because you'll have some minor probability scenario that is a threat to your interests, and then you can find different ways.
• 27:06
  SPEAKER_02: But if you're not doing the structured and clear scenario analysis with probabilities, then it will be very hard to hedge responsibly.
• 27:15
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you so much for that clarification.
• 27:17
  SPEAKER_00: That's that's important to know.
• 27:18
  SPEAKER_00: Is the US still a credible ally given developments in the Middle East and problems with the EU?
• 27:24
  SPEAKER_00: It seems that we are taking this for granted.
• 27:27
  SPEAKER_00: So what did what do you think about that?
• 27:30
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I think the answer is it is less of a credible ally than it was before.
• 27:35
  SPEAKER_01: I think some credibility was lost in 2016.
• 27:38
  SPEAKER_01: And I think an additional set of credibility was lost in the process of the 2024 election and the the the kind of the realization by the rest of the world that American politics for the time being was going to go back and forth between these two polar-ish extremes.
• 27:58
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know if there's a light switch of reliable ally, as much as there's a dial and one that has gone up and down throughout history.
• 28:07
  SPEAKER_01: I think, you know, if you were in the immediate aftermath of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, right, to some countries in Europe, the kind of rash decision to go into this war and then realizing eventually that there were no weapons of mass destruction felt like the US was unreliable in terms of the quality of intelligence and the kind of conflicts that it was dragging its allies onto.
• 28:28
  SPEAKER_01: We somewhat, but not entirely, recovered from that.
• 28:31
  SPEAKER_01: So I think the dial will keep going.
• 28:33
  SPEAKER_01: I think our European allies are clear, some of our European allies are clearly extremely concerned about the reliability of the US security umbrella over Europe.
• 28:45
  SPEAKER_01: There are other European allies that are doubling down on the US relationship, like Poland, like the Baltics, because they realize that there is no better alternative and that they don't trust the politics of France or the UK any more than they trust the politics of the United States.
• 29:13
  SPEAKER_01: And there's some transformation in kind of the role that Australia is playing in the region and to a lesser degree the Philippines.
• 29:19
  SPEAKER_01: But in the end, the the appeal, at least for now, of the US alliance continues to be very, very strong.
• 29:28
  SPEAKER_01: Again, because of scale, and until other options can match the scale, which seems unlikely in the short term.
• 29:35
  SPEAKER_01: This alliance is still, you know, part of it, reliable or not.
• 29:39
  SPEAKER_02: The other thing we have to do there is, and I think this is for all of us who are trying to get a better understanding of geopolitics, is we have we have to set aside questions of ethical or moral integrity of the actors.
• 29:51
  SPEAKER_02: First of all, because they're nation states, so they they may just not really be that ethical.
• 29:55
  SPEAKER_02: But second of all, even if we think about the leadership and the ethics of leadership, it's interests that will determine the way that all the institutions combine and behave.
• 30:05
  SPEAKER_02: So, for example, you know, Britain, Britain was known and reputed, um, was notorious for centuries as perfidious Albion because they would constantly betray their allies on the continent.
• 30:17
  SPEAKER_02: Now, why were they doing that?
• 30:18
  SPEAKER_02: Well, they, from the British point of view, it wasn't that they were always betraying everyone.
• 30:22
  SPEAKER_02: It was that they were shifting according to new conditions on the continent, whether it was the Austrians and the Spanish that that threatened to dominate the continent and therefore dominate England, or whether it was the French or whether it was the Germans who threatened to dominate the continent and dominate England.
• 30:38
  SPEAKER_02: So the United States has actually inherited British grand strategy to a considerable extent and exhibits some of that tendency to shift because of the ability to, first of all, just the capability and the mobility, which is mostly naval, but also nowadays air power, cyberpower.
• 30:56
  SPEAKER_02: And the question is, what are the U.S.
• 30:59
  SPEAKER_02: interests?
• 30:59
  SPEAKER_02: Now, in the UK's favor, the U.S.
• 31:02
  SPEAKER_02: will consistently be interested in a partnership with the UK, an alliance with the UK.
• 31:06
  SPEAKER_02: In Europe in general, I actually think that the alliance is much better founded than people tend to say today.
• 31:12
  SPEAKER_02: We're having a very significant quarrel between the Trump faction and Europe.
• 31:18
  SPEAKER_02: But the underlying need for uh the two to get along is pretty clear because the United States does not want to position large armies in Europe to fend off the Soviets.
• 31:28
  SPEAKER_02: And Europe doesn't want to build an entire Navy redundant with the American Navy in order to maintain peace in Western Pacific.
• 31:36
  SPEAKER_02: So there's a pretty clear trade-off.
• 31:37
  SPEAKER_02: And Europe definitely does not want the U.S.
• 31:39
  SPEAKER_02: to start stealing territory from Europe, which is what President Trump, in some bizarre world that we live in, has suggested he might do.
• 31:46
  SPEAKER_02: So the thing is that as these two recognize their shared interests, they will tend, they'll have quarrels, though, and they could be pretty severe quarrels, by the way.
• 31:56
  SPEAKER_02: Like the Baltics were mentioned.
• 31:57
  SPEAKER_02: Putin could this year, he could tomorrow, he could anytime this year or next year stage a significant provocation in the Baltics, and the American president could dither and delay, and there could be a significant question as to whether the U.S.
• 32:10
  SPEAKER_02: is credible in upholding the collective security of NATO.
• 32:14
  SPEAKER_02: But the U.S.
• 32:15
  SPEAKER_02: institutions ultimately do support adhering to NATO.
• 32:18
  SPEAKER_02: So that damage would probably be temporary.
• 32:21
  SPEAKER_02: There'd be some psychological uh wound, but it would probably be manageable as opposed to a situation where the U.S.
• 32:28
  SPEAKER_02: utterly abandons Europe.
• 32:29
  SPEAKER_02: And we know this because we know that the US doesn't actually want a hostile power to be rooted in the European continent.
• 32:35
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but where there would be a big problem would be if there simply weren't that interest.
• 32:39
  SPEAKER_02: So for example, and I'll conclude, but Taiwan, the US has a clear interest that many people say, oh, the president doesn't care about Taiwan, he's willing to trade Taiwan away.
• 32:49
  SPEAKER_02: And that you could say this about various presidents.
• 32:51
  SPEAKER_02: But the fact is that if a hostile power were able to acquire Taiwan and it interrupted the U.S.
• 32:57
  SPEAKER_02: flow of goods from Taiwan, namely computer chips, then we would have a devastating impact on our economy.
• 33:04
  SPEAKER_02: And so you can what you can bet on is the interests.
• 33:06
  SPEAKER_02: You can't necessarily bet on the moral integrity of the different nation states.
• 33:11
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you so much, Matt and Pablo, for a fascinating and thought-provoking discussion.
• 33:16
  SPEAKER_00: And uh and I look forward to seeing what the yet unknown actually becomes.
• 33:25
  SPEAKER_03: Thank you for joining us on this episode of Global Insights.
• 33:29
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• 33:36
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• 33:45
  SPEAKER_03: See you next time.