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The researchers have never measured that level of uncertainty, not after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, not during the financial crisis of 2008, not during the euro crisis between 2010 and 2015.
For months, the global uncertainty indicator, calculated by a team of US economists, has been showing greatly elevated levels - more than three times the long-term average. The indicator, it looks like, warns of Peak Panic.
That may seem exaggerated. After all, the world economy is still running pretty well. Employment in rich countries is high and the number of unemployed is low. There is little to see about inflation. The stock exchanges ended the past week with a fat plus.
The current economic indicators may have declined, but they do not show a world-shaking crisis. And yet: A new, disturbing normality has come.
Tuesday begins the autumn meeting of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank in Washington. At the beginning, the IMF presents its new forecast for the global economy. It is expected that fund economists will once again downgrade their forecasts. Already in the summer they saw "political missteps and the associated uncertainty" as the biggest burdening factor for the economy. Since then the situation has not calmed down.
Lots of trouble spots
In just over two weeks, the deadline for the EU's exit from the UK expires. Although Brexit negotiations are taking place at the last minute, it is completely unclear how it will continue from November and whether a new agreement will gain a majority in the British House of Commons (pay attention to the decisive EU summit Thursday and Friday ).
In the trade dispute between the US and China, the signs may currently stand on relative relaxation. But the previous tariff escalation has already caused considerable damage. From a sustainable solution, both sides are far away.
Wherever you look: unforeseen events, surprising twists. In Washington, hearings are underway for possible impeachment of US President Donald Trump. The conflict over subpoenas and the submission of evidence between the White House and the House of Representatives bears the features of a constitutional crisis.
Fears are growing in Hong Kong that the Chinese army could use force to crush the freedom movement and cause a bloodbath. Taiwan's President Tsai Ing-Wen warned this week that the conflict with Beijing would spread to her country.
The army of the NATO state of Turkey occupies the Kurdish inhabited north of Syria - and the government in Ankara expects assistance from its partners. But they do not think so; instead, the NATO leadership USA is overriding Turkey with severe economic sanctions. In the Persian Gulf, the conflict between Saudi Arabia and Iran is coming to a head after an alleged missile attack on an Iranian tanker.
Not so long ago, every one of these messages would have had the potential to set global headlines for days or weeks. Meanwhile, so much happens at the same time that we barely get behind it. What is going on here?
Uncertainty creates instability
Increasing uncertainty does not mean that everything is getting worse and worse, but that the future seems less calculable. This in turn has highly real consequences for politics and the economy: insecurity destabilizes institutions, nationally and internationally. And because planning is lacking, companies and consumers are holding back; they wait, drive back investment and consumption.
Therefore, economists assume that great general uncertainty is bad for economic development. In the meantime, they have devoted a great deal of attention to this topic: 53 times, the words "uncertain" and "uncertainty" appear in the current joint diagnosis of the German economic research institutes; in the issue of spring there were still 35 mentions. In turn, a worse economic situation can destabilize politics - uncertainty is approaching further uncertainty.
The heightened level of uncertainty has a deeper cause: we are experiencing the diffusion of political power - nationally and internationally. Traditional structures of power dwindle, new actors emerge. That may seem sympathetic, like a great emancipatory movement. But at the same time, the world becomes more unstable and less controllable.
The International Dimension: Fighting the Great Powers
At international level, the US has been dominating power for decades. They created and supported institutions - such as the IMF, World Bank, NATO, and the World Trade Organization (WTO) - that established an international order. Of course, it was an order to the taste of the hegemonic power, but at least the rules were clear.
Other Western countries helped to support this order: the G7 (US, Canada, France, UK, Germany, Japan), which was founded in the mid-1970s, accounted for more than half of global GDP, world trade and greenhouse gas emissions. Today, the respective share is only around one quarter. At that time, the West led unchallenged thanks to concentrated power resources. The Soviet Union could only compete militarily. At that time, China was hardly able to feed its population.
Quite different today: The US is still the largest, but by no means the dominant trading power. Accordingly, they can no longer set the rules, but become entangled in a permanent conflict with the state-dominated large-scale economy China, which basically does not accept the Western rules. The EU is self-absorbed and far from being a great power.
In Asia, China is challenging the US conservative power, expanding its military presence in the South China Sea, and threatening its neighbors, including Taiwan, the island that, from a Beijing standpoint, is a rogue island. Russia can occupy the Crimea, and the West has little to oppose, but can only accept annexation. Turkey feels strong enough to protest against NATO's protests in Syria, not least because the leadership in Ankara hopes that Russia and China will be available as potential replacement partners.
The order of the post-war period is no longer valid. New institutions and rules have not yet emerged. The world is back in a showdown of the great powers. A secure framework for the global economy looks different.
The national dimension: populism and movement
At a national level too, the diffusion of power creates unstable conditions. Where a few years ago relatively hierarchical structures prevailed that ordered the process of political decision-making, an erratic element has now arrived. People's parties have shrunk (what is the SPD actually doing?) Or disappeared (like the French socialists).
More and more movements (from "Pegida" to the British "Leave" campaign, the French yellow vests to "Exinction Rebellion") and parties (from "La République en marche" in France to the "Brexit Party") are moving the political agenda , Organized through social media, they drive governments ahead of them.
The main economic events of the upcoming week
Monday
Beijing - Traces of Trade War - China's Customs Release Third-Quarter Trade Figures.
Stockholm - Thinker and Thinker - Announcement of the Nobel Prize for Economics.
Tuesday
Washington - World Financial Meetings - Start of autumn meeting of IMF and World Bank. At the beginning, the IMF presents its Economic Outlook.
Luxembourg - What now, Europe? - EU ministerial meeting on Brexit: The responsible government members of the 27 remaining EU countries will discuss before the EU summit whether and how a solution can be achieved.
Wednesday
Washington - Crash Danger - The IMF launches its new report on global financial stability.
Toulouse - Tandems and other means of transport - Merkel, Macron and their cabinets meet for the German-French Council of Ministers, just before the EU summit.
Westerville - Linksdrall - TV debate of the twelve promising candidates of the Democrats. Most promising candidate is currently the former Harvard Professor Elizabeth Warren. The poll results of former Frontrunner Joe Biden suffer from the foreign activities of his son Hunter. Bernie Sanders, on the other hand, recently had to interrupt the campaign for a heart surgery.
Thursday
Brussels - Historic Summit - The European Council of the Heads of State of the 28 EU states has actually only one urgent topic: to find a solution so that Britain can leave the EU in an orderly manner, ie with a contract.
Friday
Brussels - Is it a deal? - The EU summit ends. The big question is whether a Brexit agreement with Britain will come about yet.
Berlin - An Infinite Story - Special Session of the Supervisory Board of the Berlin-Brandenburg Airport Company. This time it is about the expansion of the still not opened, but already too small airport BER.
Washington - This time compliant - The US punitive tariffs on EU imports for foul EU subsidies for the aircraft manufacturer Airbus come into force. The WTO had allowed the US to levy taxes of $ 7.5 billion on EU imports. These include French wine, Spanish olive oil, Irish butter and Italian cheese.
Beijing - Living with the Trade War - China's Bureau of Statistics reports third-quarter GDP growth.
Saturday
London - Is it really a deal? - The deadline set by the British House of Commons ends when Prime Minister Johnson has to apply for a renewed Brexit extension. The law does not apply if a withdrawal agreement is in force by Saturday. Johnson had always stressed that the Kingdom would leave the EU, with or without agreements. You can be curious.
Populist leaders take advantage of the new mechanisms and surf the waves of public excitement. The fact that Donald Trump is in the White House and Boris Johnson is in Downing Street 10 is a result of these power shifts. Once at the government, populists regularly inflict enormous damage.
Actually, the opening of political spaces is a great thing. Concerns that previously had no lobby can now be articulated in public. Social media, in this sense, is a powerful vehicle that could give democracy a new lease of life. But so far there are no rules and institutions that could organize political discourses and keep them in constructive paths.
It is like on an international level: traditional power positions are dwindling, new principles of order are not yet in sight. As long as that is so, uncertainty will remain the new normal.
How does the Civey method work?
The opinion research institute Civey works with a multi-level fully automated procedure. All representative real-time surveys are played in a Germany-wide network of more than 20,000 websites ("Riversampling"), so it is not only users of SPIEGEL ONLINE interviewed. Anyone can participate in the surveys online and will be included in the representative result with their answers if they have registered. From these users, Civey draws a quoted sample that ensures that it matches the population, for example, in terms of age, gender and population density. Finally, in a third step, the results are weighted by other attendees' socio-demographic factors and attitudes to correct distortions and prevent manipulation. More information can be found in the Civey FAQ.
Why is a registration necessary?
The registration helps to weigh the answers, thus allowing a result for the surveys, which is representative of the voting population in Germany. Each participant is asked for their gender, year of birth and place of residence. After that everyone can give their opinion in further surveys on different topics.
How do the results become representative?
The answer of each participant is weighted so that the result of a survey is representative of the population. For the Sunday question and the government monitor, this population comprises the population entitled to vote in Germany. The weighting is done fully automatically on the basis of the personal details at the registration as well as the history of earlier answers of a user. More methodological details can be found in the Civey whitepaper.
Will you reach enough participants online?
Opinion polls are usually conducted by phone or online. The significance of the results depends on how many people can be reached and how many actually participate in a survey when they are approached. Internet connections and landline connections are currently about equally widespread in Germany - with about 90 percent of households, mobile phones even 95 percent. The willingness to participate in all methods in the single-digit percentage range, especially experts estimate it for telephone surveys.
Thus, in both methods there is a group of people that can not be reached because they either have no connection to the respective network or do not want to participate in the survey. Therefore, a significant number of people must always be approached for a meaningful result. Civey surveys are currently in addition to SPIEGEL ONLINE in more than 20,000 other websites involved, including various media. This ensures that as many populations as possible can be reached.
How do I recognize the quality of a result?
Until the result of a survey becomes representative, enough different people have to participate. Whether this is already successful, makes Civey transparent, in that for each survey result a statistical error probability is specified. The number of participants and the interview time are also published for each survey.
What does it mean when the colored areas in the graphics overlap?
In our graphs, the statistical error is shown as a colored interval. This interval shows the uncertainty associated with a poll score. For example, on the Sunday question, one can not say exactly how many percent a party would get in a poll, but specify an interval where the outcome is likely to be. If the intervals of two survey values overlap, then strictly speaking no statements about the difference can be made. For the Sunday question this means: If the poll numbers of two parties are so close together that overlap their error intervals, it can not be derived from which would currently perform better in the election.
What happens with my data?
The personal data of the users are stored encrypted on German servers and remain secret. Civey employees use only user IDs for reporting and can not associate users with their votes. The main purpose of the users' personal information is to weigh the answers and to ensure that the surveys are not manipulated. To prevent this, Civey uses both statistical and technical methods. In addition, Civey works with external partners who create audiences. Only when users have accepted the privacy policy of both Civey and an external partner, may your responses be used by the Partner to model those audiences. However, a partner does not receive information about your political and religious attitudes as well as those with which you can be identified. Civey users are also not ads based on their answers. You may object to the distribution to partners at any time here as a logged in user. More information about privacy at Civey can be found here.
Who is behind Civey surveys?
At this point, readers in the app and on the mobile / stationary website have the opportunity to participate in a representative Civey survey. Civey is an online opinion research institute based in Berlin. To compile its representative surveys, the software of the company, founded in 2015, merges websites into a nationwide survey network. In addition to SPIEGEL ONLINE include, among other things, the "Tagesspiegel", "World", "Wirtschaftswoche" and "Rheinische Post". Civey was funded by the ProFit funding program of Investitionsbank Berlin and the European Regional Development Fund.