The writer is chief executive of Federated Hermes Limited
There was a time when investors understood that geopolitics had a real impact on financial volatility and economies. During the cold war, international tensions played out via a blend of proxy wars and high-stakes diplomacy. As a young boy in East Jerusalem in the late sixties, I lived through one such proxy war in June 1967. That experience taught me that risk is not the same as volatility — the former carries the possibility of losing everything.
The peak of that era came in 1973. The same year that heralded the US withdrawal from Vietnam also saw the Yom Kippur war, and the ensuing oil price crisis. Then in 1989 the Berlin Wall came down, and the political scientist Francis Fukuyama declared the “end of history”.