Aslosses mount, 'Davos Man' loses his swagger

By PaulSullivan

Tuesday,January 27, 2009

NEWYORK: Thelast time the world was so rattled, the World Economic Forum descended from itsmountain redoubt to hold its 2002 annual meeting in New York. Leaving Davos and its fine alpineskiing to come to a city that was only four months removed from the September11 terrorist attacks was intended as a display of solidarity by the globalelite - a sign that the rich and powerful were not insulated from, or out oftouch with, the fears and perils of the world.

Granted, Davos Man - thatcomposite of business leaders, political figures and celebrities - was notslumming it at the Waldorf-Astoria, where the meeting was held, but coming to Americawon him some points.

Seven years later, New York is at thecenter of another crisis as the global economy enters what could be a prolongedrecession. All the gains the stock market made in the years that followed theforum's meeting in New Yorkwere wiped out last year.

With the grease from the goodtimes gone, the elite are feeling the pinch themselves. Their prescriptions,too, for running the global economy are being challenged as seldom before, ifnot openly mocked.

The opening of this year'sannual meeting comes in the midst of an economic contraction that is drawingincreasingly uncomfortable comparisons to the Great Depression of the 1930s.

It also comes a month after thedeath of the political scientist Samuel Huntington, one of the fiercest criticsof the Davos syndrome.

Huntington tookDavos Man to task in a 2004 article in The National Interest, calling him outas an arrogant snob who was mucking up the world and putting his own economicinterests first. Typical Davos attendees, he said, "have little need fornational loyalty, view national boundaries as obstacles that thankfully arevanishing, and see national governments as residues from the past whose onlyuseful function is to facilitate the elite's global operations."

Yet, in 2008, it came down tonational governments to prop up the swaggering global banks, insurancecompanies and automakers - the once rich pastures where Davos man fattened andgrazed. And they did so to salvage the national economies once dismissed byeconomically correct free marketers as an obsolete obstacle to wealthgeneration.

So, in the newly emergent worldof government intervention and its panoply of regulatory interference, is DavosMan, like the dinosaur, headed for extinction?

Or can he evolve to survive?

"We need to rethink thebusiness model in view of sustainability and ethical frameworks," saidAndre Schneider, chief operating officer of the World Economic Forum, in aninterview last week.

An ideological faith inglobally deregulated markets has been displaced, for now, by a newly pragmaticmodel. "Interventionism versus non-interventionism - that philosophicaldebate is sophistry," said Niso Abuaf, a University of Chicago-trainedeconomist and former investment banker who now teaches at New York University."Government is intervening. It's a crisis."

He draws the analogy of a youngchild with a very high fever. Much of the medical literature says that givingthat crying child an analgesic like Tylenol will only increase the recovery time.But it would be a stern parent who would not do it to mitigate the child'ssuffering.

Still, Abuaf argues, thecollapse of the free market model has not made the Davos conclave any lessrelevant, or necessary. The global economy that it championed may be broken,but that is all the more reason for this year's annual meeting - a place forseasoned players to sift the debris, jettison the rubble and start the processof pinning together the remnants into new structures.

"I wouldn't advocate thatjust because we're going through a period of crisis you should pull your hornsin and not look for creative solutions," he said.

His argument may be rational,but critics gripe that assigning the rebuilding of the economy to the companiesthat fiddled while it burned is not in the "global public interest,"to use a popular Davos phrase. This year, some of the "industrypartners" at Davos - the sponsors with the greatest access - includeCitigroup, which is breaking itself apart with U.S. taxpayers' money; Bank of Americaand Merrill Lynch, which went to the U.S. Treasury to keep their mergertogether; UBS, which has been a leader in write-downs from the mortgagecollapse; and Satyam, the global technology services company that now ranks asIndia's biggest fraud.

"The critics do ask ifthose who have been part of the problem can be part of the solution,"Schneider noted, before providing his answer: "Yes, that's the only way tofind the solution because these are the leaders and important actors.

"Not every business personcoming to Davos was an active part of the crisis," he argues. "Thereare some of them. But we need also to be fair to all parts of business."

This kind of attitude - theimplicit assumption that those who gather in Davos are the best and brightest, witha necessary leadership role in the search for solutions - is what irritatescritics of the self-styled World Economic Forum.

"The Davos self-describedfinance ne plus ultra had no clue of a) Madoff, b) the financial meltdown thatwould crimp their private jet lifestyles, c) the slicing and dicing of theirnet worths, or d) what a toxic mortgage actually is," remarked onedirector of a U.S. mutual fund company, who asked not to be named to avoidcompromising his business relations, but who has chosen not to attend theannual meetings.

Still, in the last decade, theWorld Economic Forum, which was founded in 1971, has succeeded in bringing atleast some of its detractors into the fold.

In the late 1990s,anti-globalization protestors targeted events like Davos, staging protests thatgrew violent, to protest the effects of global companies in poor areas of theworld. But by the early years of this decade, Davos had opened its doors tonon-governmental organizations and what it likes to call "social entrepreneurs,"or non-profit philanthropies, blunting the criticism of it as nothing more thana gathering of "fat cats in the snow," as the Irish rock star Bonotermed it when he himself attended in 2006.

And once the Davos bug hasbitten, it seems hard to find a cure: last year Bono was back, helping Al Gore,the Nobel laureate and former U.S.vice president, make his case for the need to fight climate change. That goalmight seem at odds with a group whose industry partners include major oilcompanies like ExxonMobil, Pemex and Royal Dutch Shell; but if so, thedissonance does not seem to disturb.

"As a social sectorperson, here is the chance to interact with the top executives from all thesecompanies as individuals, and not as these captains of big companies,"said Jim Fruchterman, the chief executive of Benetech, which runs a digitallibrary for the blind. "Social entrepreneurs are darn pragmatic,"added Fruchterman, the recipient of an award for his work from the WorldEconomic Forum's social entrepreneur program, which enabled him to attend themeetings for free.

As for how the economicdownturn is going to affect what social entrepreneurs have been allowed to do -network with the heads of companies and nations that could finance them likeany other paying participant - he is sanguine. "Are people going toretrench from this more socially engaged opinion? My personal feeling is theywon't."

The World Economic Forum isemphasizing that it will not let the global economy overshadow its nonprofitwork. "We need to keep this discussion going," Schneider said."We're afraid everyone will only focus on the financial industry."

In this respect, the Davosorganizers seem to be out ahead of their critics. Schneider says the Forum hasthree goals: to make sure short-term, economic fixes will not lead to the nextcrisis; to move toward more sustainable development ethically; and to provideideas and foster discussion on global governance.

This does not mean that Davosis shedding its image as the winter meeting spot of global dealmakers.Dealmaking will happen this year like any other, Schneider said. "It's anatural byproduct of meeting," he said. "Without new deals theeconomy will have no chance to start growing again."

For critics who say that thetraditional dealmaking frenzy of Davos blinded its participants to the marketbubbles that their activities were largely responsible for, the World EconomicForum had a preemptive, if bland, response in the Global Risk Report that itpublished after last year's gathering. The report noted presciently, ifunhelpfully, that 2008 would be "a difficult year to manage globalrisks."

"An exceptional period ofglobal growth may come under pressure as the liquidity crisis of 2007 impactsthe real economy," it warned.

This may fall into the categoryof stating the obvious. But with the global economy in such a sick state,blaming the business elite for chatting each other up in a gorgeous Alpineresort, or expecting anything more proactive, as they might put it, may missthe point. At least they are all still talking to each other.

"I hate to use thisanalogy, but if you go to a funeral it's not for the dead person; it's for theones staying behind," said Abuaf. "This is an opportunity to reweighyour life, even if you took the extremely pessimistic position that Davos isthe funeral for the ancien regime."

Of course, this is not how thefolks at Davos see it: they are pragmatic about the need for new thinking,without conceding that past gatherings may have had some responsibility for inflatingthe bubble that has just burst.

"Yes there's more to bedone, but on the other side we all have to accept that the World Economic Forumis not a government of the world," Schneider said. "At the end of theday, those very leaders who are coming will have to take those stances."