Question:  What's a 'grey swan', and what's it got to do with financials?

While black swans are inherently unpredictable, Nomura has pointed to 10 potential grey swans to worry about for 2017. The black swan concept was popularized by finance professor Nassim Nicholas Taleb's book "The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable." The book, noting that it was widely assumed all swans were white until the discovery of black swans, highlighted that outlier, or previously unthought-of, scenarios can some to pass with extreme economic impacts.

But Nomura pointed to what it called the black swan's cousin, the grey swan.

"These are the unlikely but impactful events that, in our opinion, lie outside the usual base case and risk scenarios of the analyst community," noting it was avoiding the more usual, well-discussed outliers such as a euro-area breakup, a Donald Trump impeachment or a China implosion.

• Potential shock 1: U.S. productivity might boom
• Potential shock 2: China might float its currency
• Potential shock 3: The European Union (EU) could reform, leading the U.K. to re-join
• Potential shock 4: Japan inflation might surge
• Potential shock 5: The U.S. Federal Reserve could be muzzled
• Potential shock 6: Russia may flex its muscles
• Potential shock 7: A clearing house may fail
• Potential shock 8: Japan Prime Minister Shinzo Abe loses power
• Potential shock 9: Emerging market capital controls may return
• Potential shock 10: Paper money may disappear