Every year business leaders, politicians and campaigning groups from around the world don their snow boots and $1,000 Arc’teryx Macai coats and head for the Swiss ski resort of Davos. Just as New Year follows Christmas, it’s January and time for the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting.
WEF has its fair share of critics – a hot air playground for the rich and powerful, out of touch with the realities of life on Main Street, obsessed with ‘global dialogue’ and the ‘rules-based order’. The detractors charge sheet has a familiar ring.
But when that rules-based order is itself under threat and crisis is in the air, this meeting in the mountains suddenly has a point.
After the 2008 financial crash, and with Western capitalism on the brink of seizure, the sessions buzzed as banking leaders, including Jamie Dimon, chief executive of JPMorgan, and Bob Diamond, chief executive of Barclays, clashed with presidents and prime ministers. I was in the main congress arena in 2011 when Dimon insisted that the regulatory rection of governments had gone too far (“Too much is too much” he said) only to be slapped down by Nicolas Sarkozy, then president of France, direct from the public stage. It was a row for the ages.
