A Short Tour of Global Risks

This article is based on the author's Homer Jones Memorial Lecture delivered at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, Wednesday, June 25, 2019.

It's a pleasure and an honor to deliver the 2019 Homer Jones Lecture. What I'd like to do is examine global risks and connect those risks to the literature and work that I've done. The tour begins with some of the risks. This is not meant to be encyclopedic; but I will try to be brief so we can cover a lot of ground—some of the risks in the advanced economies and then, truly global in nature, move on to risks in emerging markets. I would note that, in the past, interest in emerging markets was really limited to traders that bought emerging market bonds and occasionally equity. But while in the early 1980s emerging markets accounted for about a third of global gross domestic product (GDP), now they account for about two-thirds of global GDP. So, it's really not possible to talk about the global economy without a full, rounded view of advanced and emerging economies.