DON’T PANIC! A POP STAR IS HERE TO SAVE THE WORLD
ROBERT HARDMAN drops in on the status fest that is Davos as it indulges in a different kind of orgy – one of sanctimony and self-congratulation
FOR all President Trump’s swagger about the soaring US economy yesterday afternoon, I fear the time has come for the rest of us to stockpile the tinned food and bottled water. Cash in your prize bonds, sell your shares fast and park your cash under the mattress.
Because the most elitist of all global elites is predicting boom times around the corner. And it is a golden rule that whatever the World Economic Forum says here at its annual festival of delusional self-importance in Davos, it is always gloriously wrong.
The 2018 event has been a vintage week of astronomically expensive partying and preachy virtue-signalling inside the ring of snipers and roadblocks surrounding this elderly Swiss ski resort. After many days and nights of hob-nobbing with a tearful Cate Blanchett, Elton John, Tony Blair, the Kings of Spain and Jordan, rapper will.i.am and Microsoft gazillionaire Bill Gates, the grandees of Davos have announced the world economy is set to go from strength to strength. Oh dear.
When this lot forecast sunshine, reach for your umbrella. For this is the outfit which spent its 2008 conference banging on about climate change and exciting new ‘creative capitalism’ – whereupon the world economy fell off a cliff. These are the same masters of the universe who told us the really big issue in 2016 was going to be ‘mastering the fourth industrial revolution’. Brexit? Donald Trump? It’ll never happen.
Most of this lot loathe Donald Trump. He might be a billionaire wedded to capitalism as much as they are, but he is not of their consensual, liberal, globalist, superior ilk. Having scoffed that he would never be elected, they then dismissed him as a populist moron when he arrived in the White House. Yet the same crowd were like schoolgirls at a Justin Bieber concert when the US president arrived. Who would want to listen to wailing Europhiles while the leader of the free world was on the main stage? The World Economic Forum is a gathering of 2,000 chief executives, oligarchs, hedge funders, bankers and celebrities plus a smattering of politicians and planeloads of ex-politicians, all of them convinced that they know what is best for the rest of us.
The big theme this year – without a scintilla of irony – has been ‘a shared future in a fractured world’. This at a gathering with 433 guest speakers whose average net worth is $420million a head.
Status is jealously guarded here. And there was no disguising that jealousy as Mr Trump flew in. It was pure Hollywood.
Davos is in fact two events which run in parallel. There is the forum, which modestly declares that it is ‘committed to improving the state of the world’.
Then there is the party circuit, where the real business is done away from the cameras.
After recent events at The Dorchester in London, this might be described as the genuine Presidents Club – minus the groping. It is also the bit which the organisers do not want in the media. As one senior executive of a bank explained to me this week, Davos is a place where two rival billionaires can have a drink together without sparking movement on the stock market. It was illuminating to watch the different welcomes accorded to the various world leaders this week.
The Davos gang made it abundantly clear which way their sympathies – and prejudices – lie. So when France’s Emmanuel Macron came on stage, the audience was ecstatic. At the end, the former investment banker received a standing ovation. Theresa May, on the other hand, was received with polite indifference.
Meanwhile, the silver-bobbed sage of the Davos class, Christine Lagarde, duly delivered her verdict on the world economy: ‘All signs point to a further strengthening this year and next.’ As I say, let’s form an orderly queue for the canned food and water.