In 2014, Olivier Blanchard – the then chief economist of the International Monetary Fund – coined the term ‘dark corners’. Policy-makers, he said, all knew the economy could slip into situations in which it would “badly malfunction”: “But we thought we were far away from those corners and could, for the most part, ignore them.” 

Blanchard was referring to economists being blindsided by the world’s spiral into the global financial crisis. But since he wrote the article in 2014, economies have