At this year's China Development Forum - the highest-level annual meeting of senior Chinese policymakers and top CEOs, policymakers, and academics - discussion focused squarely on the risk of China falling into the middle-income trap.

We have entered a period of intensifying geopolitical rivalries and conflicts. If Donald Trump wins the US presidential election in November, the world will be even further destabilised.

Around this time a year ago, about 85% of economists and market analysts (including me) expected the US and global economy would suffer a recession. But the opposite mostly happened. One must approach any 2024 forecast with humility.

Hamas's barbaric massacre of Israelis on 7 October and Israel's subsequent military campaign in Gaza to eradicate the group, has introduced four geopolitical scenarios bearing on the global economy and markets.

While a severe hurricane for the global economy looks less likely than it did a few months ago, we are still likely to encounter a tropical storm that could cause significant economic and financial damage.

The G7 countries may have set out to deter China without escalating the new cold war, but the perception in Beijing suggests that they failed.

Fragmentation and decoupling are becoming the new normal - US and China remain on a collision course, and a dangerous deepening of the ongoing "geopolitical depression" is all but inevitable.

The basic principle of duration risk seems to have been lost on many bankers, fixed-income investors, and bank regulators. After being a non-factor for the last 15 years, the interest-rate sensitivity of deposits has returned to the fore.

India is poised to become the world's most important country in the medium term. Yet the model that has driven India's growth now threatens to constrain it.

The world has entered a geopolitical depression with dangerous revisionist powers challenging the economic, financial, security, and geopolitical order that the US and its allies created after WWII.

Team Transitory clearly lost to Team Persistent in the inflation debate. And now there are early signs that the Great Moderation has given way to the Great Stagflation.

Simply put, the effort to fight inflation could easily crash the economy, the markets, or both. The historical evidence shows that a soft landing is highly improbable. A recession in the next two years is likely.

The global economy has suffered two large negative supply-side shocks - first from the Covid-19 pandemic and now from Russian President Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine - exacerbating stagflationary conditions.

2021 turned out to be a relatively positive year for economies and markets in most parts of the world. But investors are likely to remain on the edge of their seats for most of 2022.

How will the global economy and markets evolve over the next year? There are four scenarios that could follow the mild stagflation of the last few months.

Demand and supply dynamics could lead to 1970s-style stagflation (rising inflation amid a recession) and eventually even to a severe debt crisis.

The stagflation of the 1970s will soon meet the debt crises of the post-2008 period. The question is not if but when.

There is a growing debate about whether the inflation that will arise over the next few months will be temporary, reflecting the sharp bounce-back from the Covid-19 recession, or persistent, reflecting both demand-pull and cost-push factors.

The same millennials who were shafted over a decade ago are being duped again. Workers who rely on gig, part-time, or freelance "employment" are being offered a new rope with which to hang themselves.

This crisis may morph over time. The second quarter of 2020 looked like an I, free fall. Quarter three looked like a V, as any rebound from very low levels of activity initially does. My baseline scenario is an anaemic U-shaped recovery.