What are Grey Swans and Gray Rhino’s in the world of risk management? Gray Swans are used to describe events that are possible but not considered likely to happen and that have extremely significant impact. Gray Rhino, this is the Elephant/Gorilla in the room and is an event that is highly probable, has high impact but crucially is a neglected threat.
Category: Covid-19

Why this economic recovery from Covid is so different?
Why this economic recovery from Covid is so different? While there has been a sharp and quick recovery to pre-pandemic levels aided by fiscal support there are notable signs in inflation, wage growth, inventory supplies and spending patterns that make this recovery look very different from the previous economic recoveries.
IMF Global Outlook – 2021
This week, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) released their latest forecast which predicts that world GDP will grow by 5.5% in 2021 against a net decline of -3.5% seen in 2020. IMF foresees that first half of 2021 will see softer growth and the growth momentum will increase in the second half. The rebound in 2021 is based on the twin-punch of a ‘vaccine-powered’ recovery coupled with policy support in large economies.

CDC’s Ensemble Forecast model for COVID-19
Looking behind the curtain of CDC’s Ensemble Forest model for forecasting deaths from Covid-19

predictive performance of the covid-19 Models
What is the error in the estimates of the popular Covid-19 models and what can we conclude from that insight?

Looking at the US Aug Unemployment report
The US unemployment report for Aug showed the 2nd biggest monthly drop in US unemployment after a 2.2% reduction that occurred in June 2020. However there are a three caveats to the impressive rebound; biggest increase was driven by temporary hiring for 20202 Census and the permanent job losses continued to rise while the number of long term unemployed hardly moved.