In the face of high and persistent inflation, recession risks, and now a looming insolvency crisis in the financial sector, central banks like the US Federal Reserve are facing a trilemma.

The bipartisan push to ban TikTok in the US reflects both the growing distrust of China and lawmakers’ limited understanding of the tech world.

The reversal of decades of economic integration will leave the global economy with higher inflation and reduced growth potential. In this new era, governments, companies, and long-term investors will need to incorporate more sophisticated geopolitical and sociopolitical analyses into their strategies.

While the sanctions regime imposed on Russia has dented its economy, it is far less severe than those imposed on North Korea and Iran, which included penalties on third-party countries. Imposing secondary sanctions could tighten the screws on Putin, but also accelerate deglobalization.

Sound policymaking has helped India modernize and achieve robust economic growth, positioning it to become an increasingly important player on the world stage.

As US inflation gradually eases, the claim that today’s inflationary pressures are the result of a temporary supply shock has re-emerged.

It is hard to reconcile the jubilant mood of many business leaders with the uncertainty caused by the war in Ukraine.

Whatever one’s favored terminology for describing the current moment, there is widespread agreement that we are facing unprecedented, unusual, and unexpected levels of uncertainty, auguring a future of crisis, instability, and conflict.

With inflation on the rise and the era of ultra-low interest rates over, financial markets will face a huge stress test in 2023.

Advanced economies and emerging markets are increasingly engaged in necessary "wars" – some real, some metaphorical – that will lead to even larger fiscal deficits, more debt monetization, and higher inflation on a persistent basis.

Over the past two years, the US Federal Reserve has repeatedly erred in its analysis, policymaking, communications, and governance.

After years of ultra-loose fiscal, monetary, and credit policies and the onset of major negative supply shocks, stagflationary pressures are now putting the squeeze on a massive mountain of public- and private-sector debt.

The global economy’s dire and deteriorating prospects, together with the scale of the climate challenge, have apparently opened world leaders’ eyes to the risks that deglobalization poses. But it remains to be seen whether this realization will be followed by the action needed to reverse course.

With a storyline full of celebrities, politicians, sex, and drugs, the future looks bright for producers of feature films and documentaries about the astonishing collapse of FTX.

Gone are the days when China could point to soaring real-estate prices and rising incomes to justify endless new construction.

After enjoying a long period of deflationary conditions, the global economy is being pushed by a wide range of forces toward a new and more difficult equilibrium.

The World Bank should be a major vehicle for crisis response, post-conflict reconstruction, and, most importantly, for supporting the huge investments necessary for sustainable and healthy global development.

The Great Moderation has given way to the Great Stagflation, which will be characterized by instability and a confluence of slow-motion negative supply shocks.

After previously eschewing interest-rate hikes, the US Federal Reserve has been tightening monetary policy at an unprecedented rate.

Despite August’s disappointing inflation numbers, the US economy is uniquely equipped to mitigate and overcome the current price surge, owing to its relative energy and food independence, abundance of immigrant labor, strong production capacity, and the capital needed to boost domestic manufacturing.

According to conventional economic thinking, incoming British Prime Minister Liz Truss’s economic experiment with borrowing and spending will produce disaster.

Some earlier big run-ups in the US currency’s value, including in the mid-1980s and the early 2000s, were eventually followed by sharp declines.

The outcome of next year's world championship chess match will likely hinge as much on technological superiority as on individual human ingenuity.

For decades, relative global stability, sound economic-policy management, and the steady expansion of trade to and from emerging markets combined to keep costs down.

The longstanding argument that go-go Keynesian fiscal stimulus is the answer to every imaginable economic shock has been exposed as bankrupt.

There is much debate about the effectiveness of Western sanctions, the Ukraine war’s implications for markets and the global economy, and what the West’s next steps should be. While there are few good options, some are clearly worse than others.

In the longer term, oil and gas prices look set to rise unless investment picks up sharply, which seems unlikely given current policy guidance.

There is ample reason to worry that major economies like the United States are heading for a recession, accompanied by cascading financial turmoil.

The most recent change on the supply side of the global oil market has involved Saudi Arabia suddenly and dramatically regaining its swing-producer role.

Absent a crisis, stiffer regulation of cryptocurrencies could take many decades, especially given that major players are pouring huge sums into lobbying.

With “Team Persistent” having clearly prevailed over “Team Transitory” in the debate over the nature of today’s surging inflation, the question now is whether prices can be tamed without also causing a recession.

Rich countries have shown impressive unity in helping Ukraine counter the Russian invasion.

The US Federal Reserve certainly bears its share of responsibility for the great inflation of the 2020s.

The debt moratoria introduced early in the pandemic provided temporary relief for private borrowers, and may have limited the fallout of the economic disruption.

With luck, the risk of a synchronized global downturn will recede by late 2022.

While recent shocks have made the current inflationary surge and growth slowdown more acute, they are hardly the global economy’s only problems.

The International Monetary Fund’s significant downward revision to its 2022 World Economic Outlook, just one quarter into the calendar year, has generated headlines and hand-wringing around the world.

Although inflation has risen sharply for multiple reasons, increased demand is by far the most important factor.

Many academic studies suggest that sanctions on China or a break in Sino-American economic ties probably would have a smaller quantitative impact than one might think, at least over the medium to long term. But that is a theory better left untested.

Like the COVID-19 pandemic, Russia's war in Ukraine has contributed to the stagflationary pressures in the United States and other advanced economies.

While the Russian and Ukrainian economies are being hit the hardest by Russia's invasion, the economic consequences of the war will not be confined to the countries fighting it.

One hopes that Russian President Vladimir Putin will soon realize that his Ukraine invasion has been a spectacular miscalculation.

The US Federal Reserve’s series of suboptimal decisions in the last 12 months regarding inflation means that its next policy decision also is likely to be suboptimal.

It is tempting to think that the war in Ukraine will have only a minor economic and financial impact globally, given that Russia represents merely 3% of the world economy.

Today's inflationary surge is being felt not just by the advanced economies but also by the majority of emerging markets and developing economies.

From the pandemic and geopolitical tensions to broader macroeconomic developments, new obstacles to "normality" seem to be cropping up everywhere.

It is not difficult to fathom why the United States’ central bank is especially resistant to any quantum change in the existing financial system.

The longstanding negative correlation between stock and bond prices is an artifact of the low-inflation environment of the past 30 years.

Much like the US Federal Reserve, the International Monetary Fund has subtly expanded its own remit even as it has failed to adjust to changing economic circumstances. And, as with the Fed, higher inflation could deliver a blow to the IMF's reputation – and to the economies the Fund is meant to help.

Although major economies and markets fared well in 2021 despite all of the uncertainties surrounding new variants of the coronavirus, 2022 will bring new challenges. In addition to central banks shifting toward policy normalization, geopolitical and systemic risks are multiplying.