The Securities and Exchange Commission has fined the New York Stock Exchange $9 million after a systems failure caused widespread disruption when markets opened in January 2023, skipping the opening auction process for thousands of stocks and triggering volatility across the market.
Separating how often from how bad gives the future shape, and for a lot of decisions, that shape is enough. The problem is that both frequency and magnitude are uncertain, and human intuition can strain when asked to hold too many combinations of uncertain factors at once.
The Central Bank of the United Arab Emirates has sought to reassure markets that the country’s banking and financial sector remains resilient and fully operational, even as geopolitical tensions across the region have intensified.
In my recent LinkedIn post, I argued that risk appetite is the most profound and important principle in risk management, and yet, in practice, it often results in the most shallow and trivial application. The more I reflect on it, the more this paradox seems to explain many of the shortcomings we see in modern risk frameworks.
There are periods when geopolitics hums in the background of corporate life, unsettling, tragic, but still distant enough to be categorized as “external.” And then there are moments when the map seems to press directly against the operating model of the enterprise. Escalation involving Iran sits firmly in that latter category, not because conflict in the region is new, but because it concentrates so many interlocking systems (energy corridors, cyber capability, sanctions regimes, proxy networks, global shipping routes) into a single geography where instability reverberates quickly and unevenly.
Speaking at The Economist’s Antitrust Summit 2026, Sarah Cardell did not pretend the ground beneath competition policy is steady. A year ago, the global economic order still felt strained but familiar. Today, she suggested, it feels fundamentally unsettled.
Risk is an ever-present feature of enterprise operations. Whether it manifests as operational disruption, regulatory change, strategic misalignment, or the volatility of emerging threats, risk is embedded in the daily conduct of business. Yet it is not the presence of risk that should concern us most, but the way in which it is understood, managed, and integrated into the lifeblood of planning and decision-making.