Author: Giovanna Faggionato, Carlo Martuscelli

BRUSSELS ― What if everything suddenly got really, really bad? What if, instead of getting respite after years of pandemic, war, terrorism and, most recently, global IT paralysis, it all just kept getting worse? Because in the past few days a wave of volatility has engulfed the world’s financial markets. It could mean nothing ― or it could mean Armageddon. You can read POLITICO’s more sober explainer of what it was all about here. But it got us thinking: What’s the worst that could happen? Given that if a pessimist meets an optimist, the former says, “things can’t get worse”…