Author: Michele Wucker

Washington’s devil-may-care attitude has become Beijing’s top priority Michele Wucker published this op-ed on the Financial Times beyondbrics blog November 13, 2018. In its new annual financial stability report, China’s central bank has again sounded the alarm that “grey rhino” risks — clear and present dangers that are often neglected — continue to threaten the economy. The report focused on China’s real estate market and high levels of local government, household and corporate debt, consistent with the concerns of Chinese and international observers. Indeed, a popular narrative among western analysts is that China’s debt is a likely trigger for the next financial crisis.…

For most of my career, when I’ve thought about risk it has involved specialized areas like sovereign credit risk, market risk, operational risk or political risk. But lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about how different “risk” in the financial sense is from the way people view risk in their day to day lives. Peter Bernstein’s book Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk does a fantastic job describing the evolution of conceptions of risk throughout history. He tracks gambling from the ancient astragalus dice game played with the ankle bone of sheep or deer, through Asian card games and the more recent…

This is the second installment of Michele Wucker’s new LinkedIn weekly series, “Around My Mind” – a regular walk through the ideas, events, people, and places that kick my synapses into action, sparking sometimes surprising or counter-intuitive connections.  Running in the New York Marathon, my friend Mina Guli began a new quest to draw attention to water scarcity: it was the first of 100 marathons in 100 days circling the globe. By 2030, the world is expected to face a shortfall of 40% less water supply than demand. This affects the food we eat, the water we drink, the clothes we…

Spending last week in San Francisco for the 2018 World Economic Forum Young Global Leaders and Alumni Annual Summit, I experienced firsthand both the promise and pitfalls of the technologies that together represent the Fourth Industrial Revolution. The technologies themselves are impressive. Augmedix, uses Google Glass, supported by remote human “scribes,” to rehumanize healthcare by reducing the amount of time doctors take to fill in medical reports online. Like many new technologies, Augmedix uses technology to enhance, rather than replace, human skills. The explorer Mark Pollock, who became the first blind person to race to the South Pole then was paralyzed in…

With the US stock market hitting new highs again and again and extending the length of the bull market to new records every day, it seems Debbie Downer-ish to say so. But the number and intensity of warnings of an impending crash –an obvious but neglected gray rhino risk– have been increasing, and the conversation has shifted from “if” to “when” and “how bad”? Ray Dalio, the legendary founder of Bridgewater has warned that we’re “in the seventh inning” of this economic cycle –though by that he meant that we have two years yet to go, which seems like an…

To encourage people to examine the impact of technology on our lives, the artist Lauren McCarthy decided to try to become a human version of amazon.com’s smart home intelligence device Alexa. McCarthy installed a network of remote-controlled smart devices, from cameras and microphones to light switches and appliances, and invited volunteers to stay in her home. Then she tried to anticipate and respond to their needs – like making a bowl of popcorn when she guessed they were hungry—instead of just responding to commands like Alexa does. Get-Lauren touches on common anxieties, starting with the questions of what humans can offer that machines cannot, and what…

When things are relatively quiet is the best time to step back and take stock of where you are. So this is a great time to take a fresh look at this year’s top Gray Rhino risks –a meta analysis of various top risks lists from various perspectives– and track how the most obvious yet unresolved risks have evolved. Along with my mid-year update, I’ve embedded links to articles with helpful insights on these top risks. Most risks lists appear once a year and are promptly forgotten. But that’s a huge mistake. I can’t say enough how important I believe it is to…

Who gets a say in how the world deals with global catastrophic risks? I spent a few days in Stockholm at the end of May at the New Shape Forum, where more than 200 people from all around the world gathered to share ideas about how to manage the big 30,000-foot high global threats. Our host was the Global Challenges Foundation, founded in 2012 by the Hungarian-born Swedish financial analyst Laszlo Szombatfalvy. He’d made his fortune by designing and applying a financial-market risk calculation and valuation model. Now 90 years old, he focuses his philanthropy on global catastrophic risks: threats…

The Chinese financial website Netease asked Gray Rhino & Company CEO Michele Wucker to reflect on the handing over of the reins at China’s Central Bank on the eve of the retirement of respected long-time People’s Bank of China Governor Zhou Ziaochuan. In March 2018, Yi Gang, a protege of Zhou, was nominated to head the PBoC. On March 25, Guo Shuqing was named Communist Party Secretary for the People’s Bank of China, a new role focused on strategic direction for the central bank, in addition to his role as the head of the country’s top financial regulator recently merged…

What will keep investors and policy makers up at night in 2018? For the third year in a row, I’ve sorted through lists of predictions and top geo-political and geo-economic “gray rhino” risks: the highly obvious, probable threats that nobody should say they never saw coming –yet are not always getting the attention that will resolve them. These forecasts come from the financial and business sectors as well as from political risk and policy groups, which all have distinct priorities and perspectives. Harmonizing them is part art, part science, as some bill themselves as top risks, while others aim at making…