World Tension
A live read on geopolitical risk right now, rebuilt continuously from over 200 global news feeds and placed on the same scale as the academic Caldara-Iacoviello Geopolitical Risk Index, where 100 is the long-run average. The published index is monthly; this is a near-realtime proxy of the same idea.
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How this is computed
Continuously, over 200 international news feeds are read and scored for language associated with geopolitical risk: threats and ultimatums, military build-up, active conflict, nuclear and cyber events, sanctions, terrorism, and territorial disputes. The raw signal is smoothed and placed on the scale of the Caldara-Iacoviello Geopolitical Risk Index, the standard academic measure, where 100 is the 1985-2019 average. A 26-year history of that published index provides the long-run context.
The mapping onto that scale is anchored to the Caldara-Iacoviello daily index over the current overlap and is still being refined, so the exact level is marked calibration beta and may be revised. The shape of the series, the percentile, and the drivers are unaffected.
Because a single minute of news is noisy, the gauge shows a smoothed level rather than the raw per-minute value, and it expresses the present reading as a percentile against its own recent history. This is a news-based proxy of the published monthly index, not the official index itself, and the two will not match exactly.