The world economy is swerving, and the destination is unknown

For decades, companies, investors, and policymakers operated on the comforting assumption that the global economy was underpinned by a relatively stable equilibrium. Macroeconomic and financial shocks were treated primarily as cyclical disruptions that could be managed to put things back on track toward a predictable destination—that of per capita GDP growth within a continuously globalising economic and financial order. But this paradigm is now being challenged by geopolitical tensions, the weaponisation of economic relations, the rapid advance of new technologies, and other factors.