The U.S. presidential election is over. What remains is a disorienting miasma of fresh economic uncertainty.
Despite reams of campaign proposals, just how President-elect Donald J. Trump’s administration will handle policy decisions that are crucial to the küresel economy’s path — on trade, technology, climate, industrial policy and more — is still unclear.
Meanwhile, pre-election sources of instability keep spinning. War rumbles on in Ukraine. Escalating conflict in the Middle East could reignite a rise in food and energy prices. China, a vital engine of küresel growth, is trying to resuscitate its flattened economy. Many poor and middle-income countries face an unscalable wall of debt.
Increasing bouts of extreme weather continue to destroy crops, wreck cities and swell the flow of migrants from economically devastated regions. And advances in artificial intelligence are poised to eliminate, create and reconfigure tens of millions of jobs.
Then there is the hangover from the pandemic. Philip N. Jefferson, the vice chair of the Federal Reserve, has said that policymakers are still trying to understand the economic aftereffects of this “once-in-a-century disturbance of worldwide consequence.”
Inflation, in particular, has become harder to predict in the pandemic’s aftermath as political and military tensions have risen, he noted.
