by Sam Wilkin | May 10, 2016 | Blog
Most reasonable people would agree that the administration of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has been heading, alarmingly, towards authoritarianism. Erdoğan has been accused of imprisoning journalists, censoring the media, attempting to exert political...
by Sam Wilkin | Mar 23, 2016 | Blog
In a chapter contributed to my recent edited volume on country and political risk, Michel-Henry Bouchet of the Skema Business School makes the case for a new indicator of political risk: capital flight. He writes: “when attempting to understand the complexities of...
by Sam Wilkin | Jul 7, 2015 | Blog
Between 2007 and 2012 several Eurozone countries — Portugal, Ireland, Greece, Spain — needed bailouts. In each case, the recipient countries threatened that they would leave the Eurozone if the bailout terms were too harsh. Germany and the other AAA-rated...
by Sam Wilkin | Apr 21, 2015 | Blog
The sovereign debtor that would win hands down a nomination as “most likely to fail” is surely Greece, which has just threatened to default on its next payment to the IMF. But Greece could be a distraction – history suggests sovereign default risk is rising elsewhere,...
by Sam Wilkin | Jan 6, 2015 | Blog
One of the most extraordinary geopolitical trends of recent years has been what might be called, with apologies to John le Carré, “coming in from the cold.” Many countries that had excluded themselves from the globalization system and maintained an adversarial...
by Sam Wilkin | Dec 12, 2014 | Blog
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and I go way back. In the late 1990s, as a young political risk analyst, I traveled down to Houston to talk to one of the oil majors about a large investment they were planning to make in Venezuela. “Venezuela is risky,” I confidently...
