Coronavirus: Is this the end of globalisation?

Fiduciary Investors Series

In this Fiduciary Investors series podcast Amanda White talks to Princeton University’s Professor Stephen Kotkin about the fragility of the global political economy and the potential end of globalisation.
The podcast discusses the limitations of risk management systems used by many investors and the need for a new risk framework that looks beyond a linear construct to enable investors to better grasp the complexity of investing.
It discusses the fragility of the environment and the economy due to:

• The underlying paradox of globalisation
• The lack of recognition of adaptive complex systems
• And a stagnant political organising framework.

About Stephen Kotkin
Stephen Kotkin is the John P Birkelund Professor in History and International Affairs at Princeton University.
He is the co-director of the program in history and the practice of diplomacy and the director of the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies. He established the Princeton department’s Global History initiative and workshop, and teaches the graduate seminar on global history since the 1950s.
He also holds a joint appointment in the Woodrow Wilson School for Public and International Affairs at Princeton and is a research scholar at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.
He has authored many books including his latest Stalin: Waiting for Hitler.
About Amanda White
Amanda White is responsible for the content across all Conexus Financial’s institutional media and events. In addition to being the editor of Top1000funds.com, she is responsible for directing the global bi-annual Fiduciary Investors Symposium which challenges global investors on investment best practice and aims to place the responsibilities of investors in wider societal, and political contexts. She holds a Bachelor of Economics and a Masters of Art in Journalism and has been an investment journalist for more than 25 years. She is currently a fellow in the Finance Leaders Fellowship at the Aspen Institute. The two-year program seeks to develop the next generation of responsible, community-spirited leaders in the global finance industry.
Suggested reading:
Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic (2012). David Quammen
The Butterfly Defect: How Globalization Creates Systemic Risks, and What to Do About It (2014). Ian Goldin and Mike Mariathasan,
The Rules of Contagion (2020): a mix of biology, mathematics, history, behavioural science, and anecdote, exploring how disease, ideas and behaviours move about and then cascade. Adam Kucharski.
What is the Fiduciary Investors series?
The COVID-19 global health and economic crisis has highlighted the need for leadership and capital to be urgently targeted towards the vulnerabilities in the global economy.
Through conversations with academics and asset owners, the Fiduciary Investors Podcast Series is a forward looking examination of the changing dynamics in the global economy, what a sustainable recovery looks like and how investors are positioning their portfolios.

The much-loved events, the Fiduciary Investors Symposiums, act as an advocate for fiduciary capitalism and the power of asset owners to change the nature of the investment industry, including addressing principal/agent and fee problems, stabilising financial markets, and directing capital for the betterment of society and the environment. Like the event series, the podcast series, tackles the challenges long-term investors face in an environment of disruption, and asks investors to think differently about how they make decisions and allocate capital.