THE HAGUE, March 16 (Xinhua) -- The year 2016 was plagued by shocks, or "black swans" as many would call. With Donald Trump now sitting in the White House, Queen Elizabeth authorizing her country to begin the process of Brexit, and more European elections coming up, the year 2017 could draw more attentions as many project that potential "black swans" could be hovering on the horizon in Europe.
However, a feared "black swan" event did not happen in the Netherlands as exit polls showed the center-right People's Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD) claims victory over "populism" in the country's closely watched parliamentary election.
"It is an evening when the Netherlands said 'Ho' (which means 'stop' in Dutch) to the wrong kind of populism after Brexit and the U.S. elections," said Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte, who leads the liberal VVD party, Wednesday evening.
The Dutch election has attracted so much attention thanks to the VVD party's biggest competitor the far-right Party for Freedom (PVV), as well as its leader Geert Wilders who has been dubbed as the "Dutch Donald Trump" and known for his Islamophobia.
A win for the PVV could have been the continuation of the wind of populism that has been blazing around Europe and a barometer for the upcoming elections in France in May and Germany in September.
The Societe Generale on Monday updated its latest quarterly chart of swan risks that threaten to rock the global financial markets and political landscape. Its analysts wrote that while it's tempting to lower the probability of political uncertainty, they decided to keep it at 30 percent, given the string of elections in the eurozone.
Other than political uncertainty drag, the Societe Generale team listed a sharp increase in bond yields, and isolationism and trade wars as possible risks.
According to a Twitter poll conducted by Xinhua last Friday, 40 percent of all social media participants selected France as the European country where a "black swan" event is most likely to happen in comparison with Germany (30 percent), the Netherlands (16 percent) and Italy (14 percent).
"There are the black swans, and there is the horizon, and I can see the birds winging in our direction," wrote Mark Grant, managing director and chief strategist at Hilltop Securities, in a signed article published on Bloomberg News on Wednesday.
"Rarities or not then, we have singularities approaching, and we had better be prepared for what we might encounter. With the swirl of geopolitical and economic events that confront us, the future may not be extrapolated from the past any more," he continued.
In January, Christine Lagarde, managing director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), warned against negative competition in policies at the World Economic Forum in Davos.
"If we end up in a race to the bottom on tax, financial regulation and trade, that would have devastating consequences," she said during a panel discussion on the 2017 global economic outlook, adding that "for me that would be a really big black swan."
The black swan theory is developed by Lebanese-American academic Nassim Nicholas Taleb. It is a metaphor that describes an event that comes as a surprise, has a major effect, and is often inappropriately rationalized after the fact with the benefit of hindsight.
