Ready for the next crisis?

This time last year Russian tanks were about to roll into Ukraine. Olaf Scholz, the German Chancellor, has called the Ukrainian war a ‘zeitenwende’, meaning a turning from one epoch to another. For the first time since the international fund industry got going, in the late 1980s, a geopolitical event has had a major and probably enduring impact on markets.

No one working in the fund industry today has experienced geopolitical instability, at least on any sustained basis, before. The first and second Gulf wars caused a few temporary problems but life quickly got back to normal. The same applied to 9/11.

‘Never before in my career have I seen this big a disconnect between an immensely destabilising geopolitical situation and investor sentiment,’ says Tina Fordham, who was Citigroup’s chief global political analyst before setting up her own consultancy, Global Foresight.

To read more on this story see the February edition of The NED.