Who says nothing gets done at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland? As the weeklong winter fest, which costs tens of thousands of dollars to attend, has grown over the past decade, it has become as much about dealmaking as about brainstorming solutions to the world’s problems. In fact, gray-suited consultants slipping around the Magic Mountain in their city loafers now seem to outnumber genuine thought leaders by about 2 to 1.
Still, the elite haven’t abandoned Davos. This year’s shindig drew several heads of state, the world’s top bankers and a good helping of Fortune 500 CEOs, Nobel laureates and rock-star entrepreneurs. Davos remains, as Foreign Policy Group CEO David Rothkopf put it, “the factory in which conventional wisdom is manufactured.”
Multinational companies are under fire. Five years on from the financial crisis, countries with shrinking public budgets are finally pressuring rich firms to pick up some of the costs of globalization rather than just the benefits.
We are now in historically uncharted territory in terms of how much central bankers are doing, in lieu of real political action, to try to boost the global economy. They are buying up trillions of dollars’ worth of bonds and buoying world markets in the process. Apart from a few worried Germans, nobody was talking about this last year. Now everyone is fretting about how the Fed, the European Central Bank (until recently), the Bank of Japan and even Chinese authorities have distorted the prices of assets from stocks to bonds to real estate, quite possibly laying the foundation for a market crash or, in the longer term, hyperinflation. “Central bankers can buy time, but they can’t fix the world’s underlying economic problems,” said UBS chairman and former Bundesbank head Axel Weber.
Read more: Davos: Why the Elites Are Losing Sleep | TIME.com
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