Jim O’Neill, a former chair of Goldman Sachs Asset Management and a former UK treasury minister, is a member of the Pan-European Commission on Health and Sustainable Development

At the start of the year, I expressed concerns about the outlook for financial markets, owing to all the considerable uncertainties that I could identify, and to the many other potential risks that were not yet clear. This was after Russia had begun to mass troops on Ukraine’s border, but before it had invaded. Now that Russia has launched its war of aggression, it has been almost totally removed from the international economy and markets, and energy and food prices have spiked.