The Fat Tail: The Power of Political Knowledge for Strategic Investing

In recent years, investors have learned the hard truth that in the international economy, politics often matters at least as much as economic fundamentals for the performance of global markets. Too many companies and investors haven't yet learned to read the warning signs: their expertise lies much more in economics than politics, and the temptation is to hope that highly volatile situations such as the 2008 Georgia-Russia confrontation will be few and far between. But as Ian Bremmer and Preston Keat demonstrate, these scenarios--and their catastrophic effects on business--happen much more frequently than we imagine. On the curve that charts both the frequency of these events and the power of their impact, the 'tail' of extreme political instability is not reassuringly thin but dangerously fat.