Erika Mouynes | Geopolitical Risk & Investment Strategy Advisor

Flagship research

The Certainty Business

Scoring a Decade of Geopolitical Risk and Market Forecasts, 2016–2026

15Institutions graded

10Years of outlooks

3Grading tiers

0Full hits

Certainty is the product the forecasting industry sells. This research puts a decade of it to the test.

The study grades a decade of year-ahead outlooks from political risk houses, global banks, asset managers, and the IMF against a rubric that asks four things of every call: an actor, a mechanism, a direction, and a time window. No call in any cycle of the sample earned full credit.

The failure is structural. The events that move markets are driven by cornered leaders playing personal survival games, and those games offer no base rates to extrapolate and no stable logic to solve.

Credit accrues where a forecast describes conditions already visible in the present. It evaporates where a forecast tries to call a discontinuity. The practical conclusion for investors: buy scenarios, visible conditions, and short horizons, and stop paying for point predictions.

Read the full research Paper on SSRN

Open questions

Questions I’m working on

Why does demand for forecasts grow as the world becomes harder to forecast?

What makes a geopolitical call specific enough to guide a real decision?

How should boards and investors manage uncertainty once prediction fails?

Advisory

Turning geopolitical uncertainty into decisions

Erika advises investors, corporations, and boards on how political change affects capital allocation, market access, and strategy. The work rests on three disciplines.

Political risk & scenarios

Identifying the political and regulatory developments that can materially change an investment, a market, or an operating environment, and building the scenarios that bound them.

Investment implications

Translating political developments into market consequences and portfolio decisions, and identifying where scenarios create asymmetric risk or opportunity across asset classes and geographies.

Stakeholder strategy

Guiding companies with governments, regulators, and communities when political relationships decide whether a strategy succeeds.

Advisory engagements run through Pixbae Advisory Strategies →

Writing

Selected work

Financial Times · Markets Insight

Iran war shows Latin America has left its original sin behind

For thirty years, every oil shock broke Latin American bonds. This one did not.

2026Read → Harvard Business Review

A New Corporate Playbook for Political Uncertainty in Latin America

How multinationals should rebuild their operating model for a region where politics resets the rules mid-game.

November 2024Read → Project Syndicate

Learning from the Right Sovereign Wealth Funds

Why the Latin American approach to sovereign wealth is more relevant to Canada and the US than the Gulf model.

June 2026Read →

The Panama Canal’s Next Test: Holding the Line in a Shifting World OrderCEBRI Journal · 2025 There must be more to US relations with Latin America than immigrationFinancial Times · 2024 The (Literal) Gap in U.S. Migration PolicyForeign Policy · 2021 No puede haber democracia sin confianza: mea culpaEl País · 2022 In Search of Confidence to GovernUNO Magazine · 2023 A Delayed Right: Women’s Economic IndependenceWorld Economic Forum · 2021 Top Priorities for the Summit of the AmericasWashington Diplomat · 2022

Latin America Is Leading in AI Use. So Why Is It Lagging in Adoption?Le Cercle des Économistes · 2025

Panama, a Reliable PartnerJakarta Post · 2021 Nuestro océano, nuestro corazón azulLa Prensa · 2022 A Carbon-Negative Alliance to Tackle Climate ChangeDevex · 2021

Speaking

Global engagements

Keynotes, panels, and published work spanning five continents, from the Munich Security Conference to Bloomberg New Economy.

Keynotes & panels Journals & publications

Munich Security ConferenceMunich, Germany

United NationsNew York, USA

OECD ForumParis, France

Bloomberg New EconomyPanama City, Panama

Concordia Annual SummitNew York, USA

Atlantic DialoguesMarrakesh, Morocco

International Chamber of ShippingGlasgow, Scotland

Doha ForumDoha, Qatar

Tribuna EFE, Casa de AméricaMadrid, Spain

Harvard–Columbia World Development ForumBoston, USA

Salma DialogueTunis, Tunisia

World Humanitarian ForumGlasgow, Scotland

Young Americas ForumLos Angeles, USA

CEBRI JournalRio de Janeiro, Brazil

Jakarta PostJakarta, Indonesia

Le Cercle des économistesParis, France

Erika Mouynes speaking at the Munich Security Conference — Munich Security Conference

Erika Mouynes on stage at the Doha Forum — Doha Forum

Erika Mouynes on a panel at the Young Americas Forum in Los Angeles — Young Americas Forum, Los Angeles

The Certainty Business

What a decade of graded forecasts reveals about the political risk industry, and what investors should buy instead.

Scenarios Over Forecasts

A working method for pricing politics into portfolios: visible conditions, short horizons, and asymmetric positioning.

Latin America, Repriced

Why the region’s macro discipline has quietly rewritten its risk premium, and where capital moves next.

Fall 2026: Keynote, Meritas Annual Conference, Panama City.

Request analysis & insight

About

Where Wall Street meets foreign relations

Most political risk advisors come from one world. Erika Mouynes has operated at senior levels in three: global finance, government, and academia.

On Wall Street, she spent nearly two decades as a C-suite executive at a multi-billion dollar investment firm and as a senior attorney at Shearman & Sterling LLP, structuring cross-border deals, M&A, and infrastructure projects across emerging markets, including the $2.3 billion financing package for the Panama Canal expansion.

As Panama’s 62nd Minister of Foreign Affairs, she directed the country’s foreign policy through a period of systemic global disruption and saw first-hand how government decisions reshape the regulatory environments, trade flows, and sovereign risk profiles that decide whether an investment delivers or destroys value.

Today she leads Pixbae Advisory Strategies in New York, helping investors and corporate boards integrate geopolitical analysis into capital allocation. She serves on the Board of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute and has taught and conducted research at Harvard since 2022.

Pixbae Advisory Strategies

Founder and CEO. Advising institutional investors, asset managers, and global corporations on integrating geopolitical risk into portfolio construction and emerging market allocation.

Investment & Legal

C-suite executive at a multi-billion dollar investment firm. Senior attorney at Shearman & Sterling LLP. Cross-border M&A, structured finance, and emerging market infrastructure across 30+ jurisdictions.

Government

62nd Minister of Foreign Affairs, Republic of Panama. First-hand experience in trade negotiations, regulatory frameworks, and sovereign risk dynamics.

Academic & Institutional

Board Member, Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute. Former Chair, Atlantic Council Adrienne Arsht Latin America Center (2022–2025). Resident Fellow, Harvard Institute of Politics (Spring 2024). Fellow, Harvard Advanced Leadership Initiative (2023).

Media