The Age of the Grey Swan

The risk of doing business with dictators

Claire—my friend Sergei Cristo, a Russian emigré, works for Candriam, a global asset management firm with offices in Paris. When we had lunch the other day, he told me that analysts at Candriam had run the numbers on investing in autocracies and found that contrary to conventional wisdom, there’s no contradiction between investing wisely and supporting liberal democracy. To the contrary, investors are fools to ignore political risk, as so often they do, when they consider emerging markets.

I found this interesting and asked him if we could publish an edited version of the relevant part of the report. Candriam kindly gave us permission to do so, for which we’re grateful.