Financial markets won’t be spared as geopolitical rules are torn up

Witticisms about economists abound. George Bernard Shaw apparently remarked that if all the world’s economists were laid end to end, they still would not reach a conclusion. There are quips about the “three-handed” economist – on the one hand, on the other hand, and so forth – and how economists have predicted far more recessions than have come to pass.

It was therefore with anticipation that I joined a conference last month in Lindau, Germany, to discuss the dismal science. The 8th Lindau Nobel Meeting in Economic Sciences saw the gathering of 22 Nobel laureates (18 in economic sciences) and almost 300 scientists, mostly young, many with PhDs – and me, a newly minted PhD holder but as old as some of the Nobel Prize winners.

It seemed appropriate that many of the Nobel laureates in economic sciences are physicists and mathematicians and had studied psychology – indeed some are even economists. It was a treat hearing the life work of such lauded teachers, and the lasting lessons came from distilling the major themes arising in economics today.

As befits the current environment, several sessions concerned the fragility of markets and how government authorities can act to recover from a crash. Alas, the hard question is how to forecast a crash. Bubble markets, easier regulation, a reduction in moral hazards, new players and rapidly evolving technology are worryingly evocative indicators of what is happening in today’s financial markets.

Discussions of geoeconomics focused naturally on Europe, with speakers from the US and Europe discussing a tripolar world. The absence of a speaker from Asia was a glaring omission, especially as many of the young PhD holders were of Chinese origin. From the Asian perspective, it looks more like a bipolar world of China and the US, as Europe suffers from overregulation, an ageing workforce and inefficiencies in innovation and research spending, which are fragmented and unnecessarily competitive.

There was a stark comparison of “lean and hungry” Chinese workers against French worker proposals for a 32-hour week. One US laureate observed that the average American worker was also putting in fewer hours than the Chinese. In a sharp reversal, Chinese technology is now regarded with great respect, to the extent that Europe and the US must start to borrow ideas from China. The big question is whether China wants or needs to licence its intellectual property to the West.