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LinkedIn: Welcome back to LinkedIn at the Cayman Alternative Investment Summit, I’m Devin Banerjee, LinkedIn Senior Financial Services Editor. I’m very pleased to be joined now by Ian Bremmer, Founder and President of Eurasia Group, also a LinkedIn influencer. Ian, thanks for joining us. So Ian, you have talked about how we are not in an economic recession at the moment or yet, but we are in another kind of recession. What type of recession is that and how do you define that?

Ian Bremmer: We are in a geopolitical recession, right? And geopolitics, like economics, have boom and bust cycles and, you know, they’re longer actually – economic recessions lats about seven years on average and so we are used to them, we have a description for a technical recession, we know how we want to get out, if it’s deep, if it’s not – a geopolitical recession, when it happens, a lot of people don’t recognise it, right?

And what it means is the geopolitical order has moved so far away from when you created your architecture and institutions, your institutions start not functioning anymore so you need new ones because the order moves but the institutions don’t. So we are now entering this period where the Americans are less willing to provide the leadership on national security or trade or promotion of democracy and values; our allies are more divided and weaker, and the Chinese are most importantly building alternative structures that 10-20 years ago we thought, they’ll get wealthy, they’ll align with ours, but not at all: [the] Belt and Road [Initiative] is something very different, their 5G system is something very different, all of that together means the geopolitical order is now a bust cycle. Where the institutions don’t really work, there’s not a lot of leadership, but we don’t know what the next institutions are going to be yet, and that is a period of pretty profound macro volatility for the markets, right?

Because suddenly political risk isn’t about what some emerging market leader does or doesn’t do or some cross-border conflict, it’s actually about the structure of the global order, the end of a global free market, a hybrid economy, a hybrid system – these are really important things for people that are in the financial sector.

Click to watch the full interview between LinkedIn Senior Financial Services Editor Devin Banerjee and Ian Bremmer, Founder and President of Eurasia Group, from the studio at CAIS20.