Threats to the world economy

“How large will that impact be?” he asked during the 4th Invested Interest Investment Market Conference organized by Eurobuild CEE in Warsaw. “It’s unclear to me. We need to look at it country by country but certainly even countries like Poland where you see very strong fundamentals: low debt, high foreign exchange reserves, will not escape this impact because you have big trade partners who will suffer from this.”

For the longer term he talked of two further trends that threaten economic stability “One is demographics,” he claims. “Poland like many many other countries in the world is facing a decline in labour force. You ar getting older. The proportion of older people will increase significantly over the coming years and that is true for about 75 pct of the countries in the world. So where are the workers going to come from? Besides that, who’s going to pay for your pensions?” Carlos E. Piñerúa asked.

One more trend he sees as challenging is increasing automation. “A lot of jobs will be lost,” he claims. “What’s going to happen to those people? In a sense there are balancing factors, but not completely. Even if you were able to replace those people that are not on the market with robots. Are you going to tax robots to pay for your pensions?” he asked.