Four aviation CEOs assessed the persistent economic damage from elevated oil prices at the IATA Congress 2026 in Rio de Janeiro and the broader geopolitical shifts threatening global cooperation.
Richard Quest shared that whilst people Quest Business may get terribly excited you know oil was up four per cent or down two per cent or whatever bouncing around $95 to $105 the damage is being done between $60 and $95.
Marie Owens Thomsen shared that more rules of thumb obviously they are never perfect but she would say around eighty dollars a barrel is the sort of the difference between an oil price that supports the global economy and detracts from the global economy and an oil price over one hundred dollars a barrel is a recessionary signal.
The conversation moved to political developments and their implications. Nick Allan shared that we are seeing it in those of you here from where I come from England sort of general political chaos as people search for kind of simple answers to really complex problems and explained that the reason why Orban lost was he was actually doing a really poor job by the end of it in terms of he had made promises and he was not delivering on them and he had got mired in corruption and the Hungarian people got fed up and the Hungarian institutions survived. He noted parallels with Brazil where institutions held up during the transfer of power from Bolsonaro to Lula.
Matt Kaminski shared that we are celebrating a pretty important birthday next month which as a reminder it is the world’s oldest democracy and the main reason why it is the worlds oldest democracy and is a thriving democracy is because it has a very strong institutional order, adding that clearly there are issues with Congress which is a much weaker institution than it used to be and the courts are holding up while Trump is testing the power of the executive but he subscribes to the pendulum theory of American politics. Nick Allan shared that what this period we are going through which we seem to have been in for quite a long time has demonstrated that individuals matter so Donald Trump President Trump he matters and President Putin matters because these are if we look at Russia Ukraine one it was very clear to just about everybody that invading Ukraine was a very bad idea.
On Russia Eleanor Budds of S&P shared that the sanctions against the various and many many different sanction packages had very little overall effect until quite recently which is the sanctions from the end of last year that mainly the US put on Russian companies operating outside of Russia and that has had the biggest impact which has stopped them and that the economic situation in Russia has degraded but Russia is holding up and has got a very strong kind of internal economy. Nick Allan shared that they are delighted with a very high oil price and they are delighted about the Strait of Hormuz because more money is coming in.
Marie Owens Thomsen shared her greatest anxiety is therefore the trend that we are seeing against multilateralism and in favour of everybody conducting more me first policies and stressed that if we do not have and if we cannot uphold multilateralism as it pertains to our industry then we get this kind of radical fragmentation and that is just an existential threat way beyond the price of jet fuel. She shared that if you have every country having its own rules and regulations and these are not harmonised then there is no global network and that our founding fathers so to speak the people who agreed on the Chicago Convention back in nineteen forty four they already understood this that we need globally harmonised rules if we are going to have a global civil aviation system. Marie Owens Thomsen added that somehow we are willfully or not moving away from that and dismantling the system and once you start losing routes as we see in response to things like that or war they also do not just pop back so the damage that you do is going to last much longer than people think and might not be possible to undo. Nick Allan shared that radical fragmentation captures what is going on and that it makes global cooperation when we have got some really big challenges really difficult to drive that in this radical fragmentation.
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