The Age of Agility: Midyear Signals for 2026
episode
The Decisive Podcast: Insights and analysis to empower confident decision-making.
30 min
4 speakers
2 chapters
transcribed 1 month ago
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What are the three strategic themes of the Age of Agility and why were they chosen?
You're listening to the Decisive Podcast insights and analysis to empower confident decision making.
Hello and welcome to the Decisive Podcast. I'm your host, Kristen Hallam. I revisited our key strategic themes for twenty twenty six in a client webinar on june seventeenth, with S P Global Market Intelligence Experts in Economics, Country Risk, and Trade and Supply Chain. These strategic themes were detailed in our Age of Agility report released in late twenty twenty five. In case you missed it, there's a link in the description of this week's episode, which is derived from the first half of this client webinar. Next week's episode will feature the second half of the webinar, which delves deeper into how AI is showing up across our strategic themes. It also looks ahead to the rest of 2026 as well as 2027.
That's right. We're not quite halfway through 2026 and we're already thinking about 2027. Admit it, you are too. Without further ado, here's the Age of Agility Mid Year Singles for twenty twenty six, part one. At the end of 2025, we framed 2026 around three strategic themes shaky economic foundations, shifting asymmetric power, and adapting to trade realities. Now at mid year, we're revisiting those themes in a more shock prone environment. The question is not simply whether our strategic themes still hold. It's what has shifted, which signals matter most now, and what that means for you as decision makers heading into the second half of 2026 and beyond. These themes don't sit separately. Economics, geopolitics, energy, AI investment, trade policy, and logistics are all interacting in real time.
We will explore the global economy's exposure to shocks and where resilience may still hold. How geopolitical competition, resource nationalism, and emerging technologies are reshaping power dynamics. And how logistics and supply chains are being rewired as companies adapt to sustained disruption. Let me introduce our SP Global Market Intelligence Experts now, Ken Waltriott, Vice President, Global Economics, Lawrence Allen, Head of Insights and Analysis, Europe and North America, and Eric Johnson, Senior Editor Technology at the Journal of Commerce. We will talk about all of these themes, starting with Shaky Economic Foundations. Ken, in our Age of Agility report, which was published in the fourth quarter of 2025, we described 2026 economic growth as a delicate balance between tailwinds, such as looser fiscal policy, and headwinds, including debt burdens and trade uncertainty.
How has the war in the Middle East and the resulting oil price shock influenced that view?
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. At the very least, investors might require compensation for holding long-term debt. That pushes up yields. That implies borrowing costs for Households and businesses. In a worst case, there could be a loss of confidence in debt sustainability, interest rates spike, governments have to raise taxes to bring government deficits down, you fall into recession, and so on and so forth. Now, for the specifics of the conflict in the Middle East, obviously it's another example of how geopolitical developments can materially change the economic outlook.
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