Political stability was at most a factor in assessing developing countries or Russia. It is now also an issue in Western democracies.

The rise of populist parties such as the Five Star Movement in Italy and the Front National in France are rocking the political certainties of the last decades. And that also affects the economy.

Many people who have lost out in the last few decades voted for Trump. Trump will have a difficult time turning them into winners. The jobs of these people are not at risk because of Chinese or Mexican workers, but because of robots and computers. And new trade barriers and higher tariffs are not going to change that.

Trump can, like every government, trigger a short boom with borrowed money, just like he has announced. He appears to want to adopt the economic policy approach favored by Republicans of putting lots of money into building roads and cutting taxes. Markets like that. But, at the end of the day, someone always has to foot the bill.

If you leave school at 16 then, in all probability, there is a machine that can do what you can do better and cheaper. And Trump can't do anything to change that.

The high-tech industry needs the immigration of highly qualified labor, from India, from China, from everywhere.

Political uncertainty around the world has more than doubled since the election of Trump. To find anything comparable we have to go way back, to the late 1920s for example, the times of the Great Depression. Or think of the United Kingdom in the 1970s, when the International Monetary Fund had to help the country out with a dramatic rescue operation. Up until the Greek crisis, that was the last time that the IMF was forced to intervene to such an extent in Europe.