What should corporate directors know in these volatile times?
March 20, 2026
Corporate boards are increasingly treating policy, geopolitical, and economic uncertainty as permanent and baseline features of the operating environment—not as transitory shocks. With this eyes-open awareness, companies can move forward in these uncertain and volatile times.
To help corporate directors who are not international relations or geostrategy experts enhance their strategy, oversight, and risk management roles, we have created this one-page cheatsheet of issues to watch and questions to ask.
Topline Business Issues and Trends to Watch in 2026
January 10, 2026
This brief presents Longview’s outlook for the global business leader agenda in 2026. In addition to covering key geographies and AI, it outlines six topline trends:
- Business leaders will have to continue reading through noisy and misleading headlines. Expect more disconnects between conventional wisdoms, business and consumer surveys, and actual performance.
- Trump administration policy is both transformative and being written in pencil. Midterm electioneering will force policy shifts as the Trump administration reacts to declining poll numbers.
- Tariffs are a 2025 story. Expect more deals (with India, for example) and carve-outs (food and pharmaceuticals), given the White House’s newfound focus on affordability.
- For global enterprises, there is still no alternative to America. For better or worse, the US will continue to dominate the global business narrative and policy tempo, and operating in the US market will remain more advantageous than being outside it.
- AI is generating distraction risks. AI exuberance is masking economic fragilities in the US. AI developments have the potential to be the biggest risk to the economic outlook in 2026.
- Risk awareness is the new normal. Executives are increasingly treating policy, geopolitical, and economic uncertainty as permanent and baseline features of the operating environment
The 2025 Global Business Leader Agenda
December 18, 2024
Fast-paced and consequential events will make a shorter time horizon and a wider range of scenarios more useful for business planning this year. Timing business and investment decisions right will be important given the potential for big market shifts.
To that point, this outlook focuses on the first half of the year, and it concentrates on geographies instead of global trends. The second half of 2025 (let alone 2026) will look much different and is impossible to predict at this time.
2024 Global Business Leader Agenda: Sit Tight or Move Ahead?
January 2, 2024
As with recent years, geopolitics will dominate the headlines in 2024. Despite persistently slow growth in much of the world, falling inflation and interest rates will lower financial and economic risks and lessen geopolitical impacts. Moreover, the effects of many geopolitical drivers—the US election, policymaking in China, and the war in Ukraine—won’t become clear until 2025. Business leaders will have to reconsider near-term economic opportunities and geopolitical threats against the conservative, de-risking strategies that paid off for global businesses in 2023.
The Long View 2023 Lookback: The year exceeded expectations in many ways.
December 18, 2023
Optimism was off-trend in 2023, but the year ended up being much more positive for global businesses than forecasters and the headlines suggested.
In the Wake of Russia: Political Risk Management Guides for Business
March 1, 2022
Russia's war on Ukraine, onerous sanctions, and corporate exits from the region shine a bright light on three forms of political risk (country risk, policy risk, geopolitical risk) that companies face in all emerging markets. Yet, business leaders and investors often say that it's hard for them to track risks in diverse markets around the globe. Drawing on over 15 years of advisory work, Longview Global Advisors produced one-page, practical guides highlighting issues to watch and questions to ask.
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The US Election: A Business Risk Assessment
October 1, 2020, updated October 26, 2020
Election crisis scenarios have come to dominate discussions of American politics, but such thinking has been handicapped by a long history of political stability and notions of American exceptionalism. Longview applies an emerging market political risk assessment framework to the US and outlines implications for businesses. The analysis explores a full range of possible outcomes to reduce the potential for surprise—a need highlighted by the advent of COVID.
Five Forces Driving the World’s Political Risk Supercycle
Updated, November, 2019
The global political environment has been characterized as unprecedented, volatile, and dangerous—epitomized by an upsurge in populism and authoritarianism. This brief connects the dots and highlights 5 forces that are driving an enduring, global political risk supercycle: 1) slow growth, 2) inequalities in income and opportunities, 3) perceptions that governing institutions are unresponsive, 4) political entrepreneurs or insurgents, and 5) a hyperconnected social media environment. The brief also suggests three ways business leaders can respond to the threat.
