Author: Michele Wucker

I was on a Zoom call about Chicago’s economic recovery at 3:43 pm yesterday afternoon when my cell phone buzzed with an emergency alert from the city: Tornado warning til 4:30 pm Central Time. Having grown up in Missouri, Wisconsin, and Texas, I remember having spent many hours in the basement (or in the middle hallway in Texas, where few homes had basements because the limestone underground made digging too expensive) when I was young sitting out tornado watches and warnings with a flashlight and radio waiting for the all-clear. Earlier I had moved the plants on my deck to…

Michele Wucker joined The Moneywise Guys, David Anderson and Sherod Waite, on KERN radio June 30, 2020, to talk about why investors –especially small ones– should view the stock market rebound with caution, and things to keep in mind to avoid getting trampled by the gray rhinos running around the S&P 500. Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast provider.

“Two new books about the historical roots of debt could hardly be more timely,” I wrote for The Washington Post Bookworld in (gulp) 2003. I would have simply posted the link, but you can’t get the review online any more because archives only go back to 2005. But I pulled the review out of my files and it’s newly relevant. Here’s the original: “American consumers owe more than $1.7 trillion, not even counting home mortgages. A record 1.5 million bankruptcies were declared over the past year. Meanwhile, war with Iraq could cost as much as $2 trillion –roughly equivalent to a full year’s…

The COVID-19 pandemic has created a double challenge: First, an increased sense of urgency to deal with the ravages of the novel coronavirus and the systemic risks that left the world vulnerable to the disease. Second, as economies have faltered and jobs disappeared, and as debt crisis looms, there are fewer resources to meet those challenges. The pandemic-induced global recession will only hurt the ability of households, companies, and countries to service their debt, especially if a new wave of the pandemic lies ahead this fall. In turn, that debt hangover will reduce the ability of the economy to heal,…

The Chinese website China Finance Online recently interviewed Michele Wucker. Click HERE for the Chinese version. The original English follows below. Q：How will the Coronavirus affect the global economy？ How COVID-19 will affect the global economy depends on a lot of “Ifs.”  How long will it take to develop and distribute a vaccine? Will the virus mutate into a more or less virulent version? If people show symptoms right away, so that they do not shed virus before symptoms appear, a more lethal virus ironically could be resolved faster since “smart” viruses don’t kill their hosts. A less lethal version…

Riding a liquidity fueled mega-rally, the S&P 500 is back comfortably above 3000, having recovered more than 70 percent of what it lost earlier in the year. Some of that bump comes from Americans who put their stimulus checks to use by day trading. If this does not worry you, it should. The money that is going into the stock market simply is inflating paper profits instead of shoring up a fragile economy where joblessness and the sharp drop-off in economic activity make the Great Depression look like a stroll in the park. The market bubble is worsening the economic divide between the…

Author Michele Wucker coined the term “grey rhino” for a highly probable, high-impact yet neglected threat. In this episode of the Crain’s Daily Gist podcast, she talks with host Amy Guth about how grey rhinos could shape economic recovery, the practical decisions we’re going to need to make over the coming weeks and months and what helps us to bounce back quickly. Listen HERE

I wrote some ways back about the launch of Inclusion Meeting Cards, a project from the Chicago based software development company Table XI. The game is a simple, tangible, non-confrontational tool for reorienting discussion, using humor to defuse potentially tense interactions like telling someone to stop interrupting. It’s a super way to help teams to make better decisions by getting a variety of voices around the table, thus avoiding groupthink and making room for important perspectives you might otherwise miss. But amid the novel coronavirus pandemic, all of our meetings have moved online. So I could not have been more delighted when the team…

How often do you or those around you recognize that a problem exists but come up with any number of excuses to avoid fixing it? This sort of kicking the can down the road is a hallmark of the second stage of the evolution of an obvious, high-probability gray rhino crisis: muddling. (Read this recent article for more on the five stages, which are detailed in depth in my 2016 book, THE GRAY RHINO: How to Recognize and Act on the Obvious Dangers We Ignore.) Inequality is a prime example of muddling. Yes, people are aware of the problem. The French economist Thomas Piketty’s 2013…

Will the COVID-19 pandemic make it easier or harder to combat climate change? Many articles have appeared in recent weeks both comparing the coronavirus response to how people have dealt with climate change –two giant, obvious “gray rhino” crises– and tying the coronavirus reaction to the need for a more aggressive climate action plan. I was happy to share my thoughts on the links between climate change and the novel coronavirus crisis with Amy Harder of Axios, Laura Paddison of the Huffington Post, and Beth Gardiner of Yale e360 and Granta But these questions are lingering. So I want to address them in more detail here. …