The global economic expansion is so well advanced that the investment community is understandably nervous, at the start of 2016, about a wide variety of risks. Geopolitics, cyber attacks, inflation, excessive debt, deflation — there is no shortage of lurking horrors to give professional investors sleepless nights. Stuff will undoubtedly happen, as Donald Rumsfeld, the former US defence secretary, might have put it. Yet I was interested to see in the recent annual review of potential banking banana skins from the Centre for the Study of Financial Innovation that what bankers and others in the 52-country survey found most worrying was relatively prosaic: the possibility that the economic recovery would fail.
全球經濟擴張已經持續了這麼久，以至於投資界在2016年初對衆多風險感到擔憂，這是可以理解的。地緣政治、網路攻擊、通膨、過度負債、通縮，很多若隱若現的可怕因素讓專業投資者輾轉難眠。借用美國前國防部長唐納•倫斯斐(Donald Rumsfeld)的話：情況肯定會發生。然而，在金融創新研究中心(Centre for the Study of Financial Innovation)最近一份有關銀行業潛在風險的年度評估中，我饒有興致地發現，在這項涵蓋52個國家的調查中，銀行家和其他人認爲最令人擔憂的風險相對平淡：經濟復甦可能失去動力。