The New York Times is back on-line after yesterday’s outage, and includes a story that contradicts seemingly 98% of all scenarios written in the past two decades.
Growth is slowing in the “BRIC” countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China), just as growth recovers in Europe, the U.S., and even Japan.
Which proves something we know already from decades of scenario writing: you should always include a scenario (or more) that contains large-scale outcomes that you can’t quite explain or even believe at first, simply to cover yourself and your clients, and also to force you and them to think through possible chains of events that could cause those outcomes to occur.
(One line in this report causes yet another scenario to leap to mind, at least for this scenario writer: “There is little prospect that the BRIC economies will ever return to the roaring growth that had come to seem normal.” There’s another “impossible” scenario for you….)