Despite all the challenges of this autumn, Wales can be a success

AS THE leaves turn brown and days shorten, we can say with certainty that autumn is approaching. What this season, and beyond, holds for us in terms of financial, economic and political prospects is far less clear.

- LLOYD POWELL

ACCA conducts a quarterly survey of global financial professionals - the Global Economic Conditions (GECS) - assessing how they feel about the economy and their business prospects. For the first time in the survey's history (which has been run since 2022), financial professionals globally put international and geopolitical instability as the top global risk, overtaking economic concerns, which had dominated in previous results.

Businesses saw risks in inflation, recession and interest rates, were worried about regulatory and compliance risk, and talent scarcity and cyber security threats remained pressing concerns, but it was the threat of big global shocks that was keeping accountants awake at night.

As well as expressing growing unease with the rise of external threats, business leaders globally are trying to work out how best to prepare and react to issues such as hastily imposed tariffs, fluctuations in the currency markets or unexpected energy cost spikes as a result of global events such as those in the Middle East - a litany of issues that sound as familiar to business leaders in Wales as they do elsewhere.