May 14, 2009
This week on the podcast we are tackling something dear to all our
hearts, money.
The
Global Financial Crisis has hit many people hard, with the
resultant economic recession causing job losses, stock market
crashes and company failures. But what started it all? Why are we
in the midst of the worst financial crisis since the Great
Depression?
I spoke to Nick
Davis from the World Economic Forum to
answer some of these questions and to toss up ideas on how we might
emerge from the crisis. The World Economic Forum is an independent
international organisation committed to improving the state of the
world by engaging leaders in partnerships to shape global, regional
and industry agendas. Nick is based in Geneva, Switzerland and is
Associate Director and a Global Leadership Fellow within the
World
Economic Forum Scenario Planning Team. The team examines
possible world scenarios that could arise in the future. The
scenarios are not attempts to predict the future; rather, they aim
to sketch the boundaries of the plausible. They are built on a
thorough analysis of factors – social, political, economic,
environmental, technological – that could shape the future
environment of a given business, region or policy area. They
explore the possibly diverse eventualities of how the world might
look if the most uncertain and important drivers unfold in
different ways. Some of the scenarios they have looked at include
the
world's ageing population, the future of
engineering and construction and what the
world's economic systems might look like post-crisis.