The Economist.

Hello and welcome to the intelligence from The Economist. I'm Jason Palmer.

And I'm Rosie Bloor. Every weekday, we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world.

Did you know it's been a full 20 years that The Economist has been doing podcasts?

We speak to the editors who were around at the beginning and how uncertain it was that we'd keep doing it at all.

Thank you. certain it was that we'd keep doing it at all. First up, though.

First up, though. For 40 years, the Economist has published an annual rundown of what our journalists think will happen in the coming year.

It used to be called the World In. These days, we call it the world ahead. Starting today and over the next

week, our correspondents will once again give us their expert view on what might dominate the headlines

in the year ahead, from politics and geopolitics to wars and tech. But before we get to all that,

let's look back to last year. Tom Standage edits the world ahead and is a deputy editor at The Economist. And he's with me now. Happy New Year and

hello, Tom. Hello, good to be here. So Tom, I always think it's almost a moral point that we

have to think about what we said in the previous year and how we did. What were some of the main predictions for 2025 that we got right? Well, I think the things we got right, we said there would be a lot of uncertainty because of Donald Trump, surprise, surprise, that was a pretty safe bet. We said that I think it was going to be Trump technology and uncertainty that would sort of shape the year. And I think that's reasonable. We said that even if he went ahead and did his tariffs, which of course he did, that actually the effect would probably be quite muted on the US economy and you wouldn't really see them kicking in. And I think that's fair. I think there's still a bit of a debate about how much more of an impact there is to come. So I think that was pretty good. we also said that Chinese engineers were very, very good at engineering their way around the

restrictions being placed on them

by US export controls. And then, of course, in January, we had the whole deep seek moment where

that Chinese AI company revealed this amazingly capable model, which by carefully tweaking some of the

less powerful AI chips, they'd managed to train at a very, very low cost. So that was quite impressive. And we also warned of the potential for China to weaponise its control of rare earths. And that's, of course, something else we did see in 2025. So sounding pretty impressive there, but I suspect there were some things that we got wrong. Indeed. And I do actually have to do a roundup of this in the world ahead every year. I have to write both my top 10 of what I think is going to happen, but also my analysis of the previous year. And it was a bit of a mixed year. So we thought we were a bit too blasé in retrospect about the extent to which the courts would constrain Trump. And actually, that hasn't really happened. That may change in 2026. They may strike down some of the tariffs. But so far, they do seem to be inclined to let him do whatever he wants.

We obviously didn't foresee the collapse of the Assad regime in Syria or the attempted coup by

the president of South Korea. But technically, those things happened in 2024. So I think we can

kind of quietly forget about those. But more generally,

we did have these unexpected flare-ups, India, Pakistan, Cambodia, Thailand. And also,

we expected to see some kind of more action, more grasping the nettle on dealing with deficits

...