External Forces and Trends
Global Economic Outlook for 2025 and Beyond
DIGITAL ONLY MEETING
The signs from the global economy are confusing, but as the FT remarked:
“in economics, to be deeply confused is to be profoundly informed”.
In recent years, the focus of our annual economic updates has shifted. The international trade order that had prevailed for thirty years began to unravel during the middle of the last decade. This decline was intensified by the trade disruption of the Covid pandemic and its fate was finally sealed by the war in Ukraine. Consequently, our sessions on the world economy consider a wide range of factors which are likely to impact on the global business environment in which companies now need to operate. Where once we thought business disruption might come from new technologies, banking crises, or violent swings in the economic cycle, it is now just as likely to come from military conflict, climate events and social unrest.
Potentially as disruptive are government responses to these trends. The IMF has noted that Foreign Direct Investment is falling and an increasing share it is taking place between politically similar countries. Governments’ ‘friend-shoring’ policies mean that geopolitics is becoming increasingly important in FDI decisions. Add to that the forecasts of ongoing synchronised stagnation, aging populations and shrinking workforces, and the enormous task of shifting to Net Zero – and the challenges of the next few years look more complex and daunting than they have in recent decades.
Acknowledging this confusion is perhaps a good place to start. The companies that can appreciate this uncertainty, can scan and understand the volatile environment, and can anticipate and respond accordingly will be those that thrive in the coming decade. At a time when you will be refining your 2025 business plans and targets, this event will give some context and background to inform your decisions.
To provide us with insights into this ambiguous picture, our speaker is a respected economist with a broad global perspective who will guide us through the likely economic developments of the mid-2020s.
Dr. Michael Hume
Partner and Head of Strategy and Research, MKP Capital Management
Michael is a Partner and Head of Strategy and Research based in MKP’s London office. He is also a member of the Firm’s Investment Committee. Before joining MKP, he worked at the Bank of England as Head of the Capital Markets Division, Senior Adviser on International Issues, and Monetary Policy Adviser to the MPC. He also previously worked at Lehman Brothers as Chief International Economist in New York and Chief European Economist in London. He has served on international policy committees at the G7, OECD, FSB, ESRB, European Central Bank, and Bank of England.
Dr. Hume holds a B.A. in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics from the University of Oxford and took an M.Sc. in Economics as an ESRC Scholar at the University of Warwick. He received his Ph.D. from the London School of Economics and Political Science for his thesis on Economic and Monetary Union in Europe, supervised by Professor Paul De Grauwe. Dr. Hume has published widely in book volumes, peer-reviewed journals, and central bank publications on the topic of global and European financial imbalances and crises. He is an LSE Associate of the Centre for Macroeconomics.
