L’Eurasia Group, nota società newyorkese di analisi del rischio, ha pubblicato l’annuale risk assessment internazionale per i prossimi dodici mesi, con tanto di “aringhe rosse” in coda al documento. Tra queste il team di Ian Bremmer indica lo sfaldamento dell’Eurozona e le elezioni politiche in Cina, Russia, Stati Uniti e Cina.

Si legge nel report:

Paradoxically, political risk has become so fashionable that its effects are now frequently overstated.
Those 2012 political handovers in countries totaling some 50% of the world’s GDP? They’re not such a big deal this year, whether the democratic elections in the United States and France or managed authoritarian transitions in China and Russia. Moreover, serious challenges to national decision-makers doesn’t mean that governments are all poised to buckle under pressure. The eurozone isn’t heading toward fragmentation (one of the most consistently over-exagerated risks out there). The American economy is more resilient than many believe. And a Chinese hard landing? Not if Beijing can help it—and it can—in 2012. So the big challenge, for risk analysts and for corporate decision-makers and investors, is in carefully weighing the risks in a world of ever-increasing information, data, and commentary (much of it noise).
(…) The most important macro theme for 2012: The world’s key political decision-makers will be focused heavily on questions of domestic economic stability at the expense of international security concerns at a moment when politics is having unprecedented impact on the global economy. This conflation of global politics and markets defines the formal end of the 9/11 era, a moment when decision-makers sought to isolate globalization from international security concerns. The end of the 9/11 era is our top risk for 2012.
(…) It was a truism of globalization—economics drives the markets, and national security drives geopolitics. Banks hire economists and worry primarily about the private sector; the government hires political scientists and concerns itself mainly with the public sector. No longer. The culmination of a number of discrete events and longer-term trends turns the page on this formula as we enter a world where politics and economics overlap almost entirely.
(…) Just as economics is driving geopolitics, politics is now moving markets as never before. The role of politics in global markets is hardly new, but before 2008 the overlap was defined and limited. Only in emerging markets was politics the primary economic driver. Only in these countries were natural resources especially susceptible to resource nationalism and interstate conflict. Elsewhere, markets were driven mainly by economic fundamentals. Geopolitics was primarily a matter for those concerned with national security, not with the Nasdaq.
That’s no longer true, for three reasons: 1) Emerging markets are now the primary drivers of global economic growth; 2) Developed states are in structural crisis, and political decisions are an increasingly important determinant of their economic trajectories for the first time since the end of World War II; and 3) An overarching rebalancing is needed between developed and developing states. How quickly and how successfully that rebalancing occurs is primarily a question of political will and political capacity.
In short, for the first time in the era of globalization, 2012 reflects the full global convergence of politics and economics. This will fundamentally drive investor sentiment toward risk aversion, as investors focus on the obvious lack of strong and effective political leadership in virtually all of the major players.

Nel complesso l’analisi dell’Eurasia contiene diversi spunti interessanti sui quali riflettere.

Top Risks of 2012