Ken Wattret
speaker
312 appearances
3 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2026
last heard 11 Jul
Ken Wattret’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 2.
Appearances
So as a person who's in the forecasting business, what's front of mind is how difficult it is to make predictions further into the future.
But we've done a reasonable job.
So hopefully we'll continue to do that.
I think it feels like we're at a pivot point in some respects.
So if I think about what's been going on in the Middle East, if the oil shock continues to disappear,
inflationary concerns recede, central banks stay calm, financial markets carry on their merry way, then economic prospects are going to improve.
The counter to that is if we get persistent inflationary pressures, further rate hikes and economic and financial conditions can end up being much less positive.
Recent events are clearly aligned more to the former than the latter, but obviously, as I mentioned, things can change quickly.
The final point I'd make on this is even in a benign outcome, I think it's reasonable to assume that the theme of shaky economic foundations will still apply because a lot of the concerns that we're highlighting are structural in nature, be that global imbalances, trade tensions, fiscal fragilities and so on, they're not going away.
Hi Kristen.
Hello, everybody.
So it's clearly made a material change to the economic outlook, but before I go into that, it might be helpful just to take a step back and think about why we adopted the theme of shaky economic foundations.
There are a few reasons for that.
One was because
The shift in US trade policy and the related increases in tariffs that we saw in 2025 was a very vivid illustration of how geopolitical developments could be a source of uncertainty, potentially impacting on economic conditions.
We also wanted to bring attention to some underlying vulnerabilities that could also pose a threat to economic expansions.
For example, the poor state of
Public finances in many major economies.
That hinders government's ability to mitigate the effects of adverse shocks, including the one we've just been experiencing.
And also the public finances are a source of risk in themselves.
Showing 201–220 of 312 · page 11 of 16
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