Politics has become very unpredictable, making things so very difficult for individuals and also for companies.
Decreasing economic growth and increasing inequality leads to increased uncertainty.
If you leave school at 16 then, in all probability, there is a machine that can do what you can do better and cheaper. And Trump can't do anything to change that.
The high-tech industry needs the immigration of highly qualified labor, from India, from China, from everywhere.
Political uncertainty around the world has more than doubled since the election of Trump. To find anything comparable we have to go way back, to the late 1920s for example, the times of the Great Depression. Or think of the United Kingdom in the 1970s, when the International Monetary Fund had to help the country out with a dramatic rescue operation. Up until the Greek crisis, that was the last time that the IMF was forced to intervene to such an extent in Europe.
Once Brexit has actually been implemented, the world will be a very different place.
Political stability was at most a factor in assessing developing countries or Russia. It is now also an issue in Western democracies.
The Brexiteers promised their supporters wonderful things, almost none of which can ever come true. The billions that London transfers to Brussels will most certainly not land in the budget of the country's National Health Service. Brexit is going to be very bitter for many of its supporters.
Many people who have lost out in the last few decades voted for Trump. Trump will have a difficult time turning them into winners. The jobs of these people are not at risk because of Chinese or Mexican workers, but because of robots and computers. And new trade barriers and higher tariffs are not going to change that.
Trump can, like every government, trigger a short boom with borrowed money, just like he has announced. He appears to want to adopt the economic policy approach favored by Republicans of putting lots of money into building roads and cutting taxes. Markets like that. But, at the end of the day, someone always has to foot the bill.
Elections themselves do not necessarily lead to more corporate uncertainty - quite the reverse, stable democracies create a reliable environment. And elections have caused hardly any change in the basic economic framework in the last few decades.
The U.S. and, to a certain extent, countries in Europe as well, have experienced growing inequality within their population for decades - a small group of people own the lion's share of the wealth. Populists take advantage of this, and their policies are extremely hard to predict. And this has serious consequences. Companies shy away from risk, postponing their investment decisions in times of uncertainty, the stock markets get nervous and unemployment threatens to increase.
The rise of populist parties such as the Five Star Movement in Italy and the Front National in France are rocking the political certainties of the last decades. And that also affects the economy.
