You're listening to a podcast from the BBC World Service. This is Hard Talk with me, Zainab Bedawi.

Thanks for downloading this edition of the program and I hope you enjoy it.

Welcome to Hard Talk on the BBC World Service with me, Zainab Bedawi.

The COVID-19 crisis is not only a threat to people's health and well-being, it is already having severe financial consequences

which many fear will result in a crisis of the kind we saw more than a decade ago.

My guest is a professor on globalisation and development, who's also worked extensively advising

governments, including in his own native South Africa. He is Ian Golden.

And six years ago, he predicted that the next financial crash would be caused by a pandemic.

Will his prophecy come to pass that a public health emergency will lead to a global recession,

or can this be averted?

Ian Golden, welcome to Hard Talk.

It's a pleasure to be here.

So what made you predict six years ago that the next global financial crash would be caused by a pandemic?

It's almost inevitable that as we connect more, as more and more people live in big cities,

close to airports, which are not only

the super spreaders of the goods of globalization, but also the bads, that contagion would cascade

around the world. We've seen many pandemics in the past. They've always been the biggest

killers of humanity. And I believed that this continued to be a major threat that was being ignored.

And so I felt very strongly and still do that this is likely to be not only the biggest threat to our lives,

but also to our financial systems and economies.

You said that the coronavirus shows how globalization spreads contagion of all kinds.

So you're attributing it there to globalization, but I have to put it to you that during the... Spres contagion of all kinds.

...