A take on the coming year and the decade beyond is contained in Global Risks 2012, the seventh annual report from the Swiss-based think tank, the World Economic Forum (WEF).

The report is published in conjunction with the Risk Response Network, a working group comprised of WEF, Marsh & McLennan Companies, Swiss Reinsurance Company, Wharton Centre for Risk Management (University of Pennsylvania), and Zurich Financial Services.

Its 60-odd pages summarise and interconnect some 50 risks in order “to improve public and private sector efforts to map, monitor, manage and mitigate global risks,” according to WEF’s founder and executive chairman, Klaus Schwab.

He has high expectations for the report’s impact, describing it as “a ‘call to action’ for the international community to improve current efforts at coordination and collaboration, as none of the global risks highlighted respects national boundaries.”

How much action the international community thinks is actually called for will depend in part on what it makes of the highly complex “spider’s web” risk matrix diagrams that WEF relies on to illustrate its claims concerning what we should all be looking out for.

By one such matrix, the five most interconnected and thus risky possibilities for the years ahead are rising greenhouse gas emissions, critical systems failure, global governance failure, unsustainable population growth and chronic fiscal imbalances.

If this list seems a bit airy-fairy (what respectable list of “megarisks” omits overpopulation or greenhouse gases?), WEF does commit to a series of risks under various category headings that might give us direct concern over the coming year.

For example, under economic risks, WEF’s report lists, in descending order, unmanageable inflation or deflation, chronic labour market imbalances, prolonged infrastructure neglect and hard landing of an emerging economy.

Under environmental risks, unprecedented geophysical destruction, persistent extreme weather and antibiotic-resistant bacteria loom large. For geopolitical risks, we face entrenched organised crime, widespread illicit trade and unilateral resource nationalisation.

Societal risks include vulnerability to pandemics, rising religious fanaticism, mismanagement of population ageing, unmanaged migration and rising rates of chronic disease.

Not to be outdone, technological risks threaten us with massive digital misinformation, plus the unintended consequences of new life science technologies, climate change mitigation and nanotechnology, as well as failure of the intellectual property regime.

Crikey! What’s to be done in the face of all this potential mayhem?

Another analyst with a perspective on global risks for 2012 is Bill Gross, managing director of US bond manager Pimco.

In his Investment Outlook for January 2012, ominously entitled Towards the Paranormal, Mr Gross moves beyond his company’s previous position that what lies ahead after the end of the global financial crisis is the “New Normal.”

“The New Normal as Pimco and other economists would describe it was a world of muted western growth, high unemployment and relatively orderly deleveraging,” he writes. “Now we appear to be morphing into a world with much fatter tails, bordering on bimodal.”

Here the reference is to the classic centripetal “bell curve” graphical distribution of probabilities, with the vast majority of probable events clustered close to the central mean of their total distribution.

But under Mr Gross’ model, the bell curve has become centrifugal, with its “tails” or extremes becoming much thicker or “fatter” than usual, meaning greater probability of remote events relative to those clustered nearer to the central mean.

What he warns of is a global shift in economic and financial risks from the classic bell curve distribution to what might be called a “barbell curve,” wherein the centre is thinned out and probabilities are instead clustered in higher concentrations located at opposite extremes of the graph.

“It’s as if the Earth now has two moons instead of one and both are growing in size like a cancerous tumor that may threaten the financial tides, oceans and economic life as we have known it for the past half century,” Mr Gross continues in his characteristically hyperbolic prose.

The root cause of this barbelling of economic and financial market probabilities, he writes, is the current combination of sovereign credit risk with zero-bound central bank interest rates. Sovereign credit risk arises where governments might not honour their debts, whereas zero-bound interest rates undermine credit expansion because increasing money supply becomes unprofitable or even loss-making for commercial banks and money market funds.

“This new duality – credit and zero-bound interest rate risk – is what characterises our financial markets of 2012,” Mr Gross asserts. “It offers the fat-left-tailed possibility of unforeseen delevering – or the fat-right-tailed possibility of central bank inflationary expansion.”

In other words, according to Mr Gross, this year holds the prospect of the global risk, also identified by WEF, of unmanageable inflation or deflation.

“Goodbye ‘Old Normal,’ standby to redefine ‘New Normal’ and welcome to 2012’s ‘paranormal,’” he advises.