Author: Michele Wucker

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…

When people ask me about the definition of a gray rhino, I often point to the top right-hand quadrant of the World Economic Forum’s annual Global Risks Report, which highlights risks that global survey respondents deem to be both highly likely and high impact. Because I think so highly of the report’s important role in drawing attention to obvious and likely risks that we should not ignore, I was honored to participate in the World Economic Forum Global Risks Report 2018 with an article on the relationship between cognitive biases and risk management. Here it is: Cognitive bias and risk…

Michele Wucker spoke via live video feed at the Netease annual economists conference in Beijing on December 18, 2017. Watch via THIS LINK Her comments follow: “When you look at a gray rhino from different angles, you get different pictures: tactical versus strategic questions, immediate versus big picture, short term versus long term. An economist sees a gray rhino very differently from a sociologist from a political scientist, even though they are all looking at the same creature. Looking in up close, we see the financial imbalances and risks to which the economic community in China has been devoting a…

After Chinese President Xi Jinping’s annual New Year’s address, it has become an annual tradition for Chinese media to scour his bookshelf for new titles. In 2018, the new books include The Gray Rhino: How to Recognize and Act on the Obvious Dangers We Ignore, which was released in China in February 2017. Other new economics books include textbooks on ecological economics, W.W. Rostow’s 1960 classic The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto, and Money Changes Everything by William N Goetzmann. The bookshelf also included texts on understanding artificial intelligence, augmented reality, and machine learning, including The Master Algorithm by…

As 2018 top risks forecasts roll in, it’s worth a quick look back at the top gray rhinos of 2017 –the most worrisome obvious challenges to the world- and the progress that has been made, or not, in dealing with them. Here’s a rundown of how the 2017 top gray rhino risks have played out. 1) The US Political Environment. Risks have increased over the year as any hopes were quickly dashed that Donald Trump would govern more moderately than he had campaigned. His erratic and bellicose behavior, against the backdrop of an investigation into his campaign’s collusion with Russia…

“Are you surprised by how calm people are about the situation with North Korea?” a new Korean friend asked me during my recent visit to Seoul. I was there to speak about the future of jobs amid the Fourth Industrial Revolution to an audience at the World Knowledge Forum in October, but spent some extra time after the event to get to know the city and the issues facing the Korean Peninsula. The appearance of relative calm was indeed uncanny. In the wake of a September 3 nuclear test, as Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un continued to sling insults…

When I compiled the Top Gray Rhinos of 2017 list early this year, I noted that concerns about financial market shocks had fallen to fifth among the things keeping risk analysts up at night. I speculated that perhaps market worries simply were wrapped in among pressing concerns about the United States, Europe, and China’s politics and economies, the top three worries on the list. Revisiting those risks as the third quarter draws to an end, I’d say market worries have catapulted to the top, though you would be hard pressed to see it in the behavior of financial exchanges. The…

Michele Wucker joined CGTN’s Rachelle Akuffo August 14, 2017, to talk about gray rhino risks in China’s economy.