2026 Annual Global Risk Lecture by Christine Lagarde, President of the ECB, held in honour of Robert Mundell and organised by Johns Hopkins University in Bologna, Italy

Bologna, 5 March 2026

It is a privilege to deliver this year’s Global Risk Memorial Lecture here in Bologna.

It is also fitting to speak about risk in Italy, because it was here that the modern concept of risk was born. Not just the financial instruments, the insurance contracts, the double-entry bookkeeping^[1], but something more fundamental: the idea that an opaque future could be made knowable through observation and reason.

Before the Italian Renaissance, the unknown was largely understood as fate – forces beyond human comprehension. Galileo overturned that belief in the natural sciences, insisting that the universe could be tested and understood. But the revolution in commerce began even earlier.

In the merchant cities of Venice, Genoa and Florence, scholars and merchants began to believe that if you observed…