Speaking at the Asian Strategy & Leadership Institute’s Economic Conversation here today, Lin See Yan, president of Harvard Club of Malaysia, cited five key risks posed by governments to businesses worldwide.

“The first and foremost apparent risk is the power of populism and nationalism in advanced democracies,” he said.

“For a generation, market participants presumed these were emerging market issues.”

Now, he said, the US and Europe are no longer viewed as stable business and investment markets.

“Today, advanced economies are generating the most disruptive political risks to businesses. Trump’s shift to protectionism is one example, disruptive Brexit is another,” Lin added, referring to US President Donald Trump at the conference titled “New Risks in Today’s Macroeconomics World”.

He said the second risk to the global economy was regulatory chaos.

This, he said, was ironic as global mergers and acquisitions hit US$3.3 trillion in 2018.

However, turbulent politics is making anti-trust issues more complicated in the US, Europe and China.

In recent years, Lin said, competition regulators had killed off many mergers and acquisitions, delayed others for months, and forced divestitures when there seemed to be scant evidence of monopoly.

The third risk, according to Lin, was the narrowly applied concept of “national security”.

He said this threatened economic integration and blurred the line between defence and commerce.

“National security reviews are disrupting trade, investments and supply chains,” said Lin.

He said the last two risks were the widening global inequality and the risk of a recession.

For many global markets, yield curve and credit spreads were pricing in a probability of a recession of at least 50% in the next 12 months, he said.