Davos elite have done well in Trump era
They may not like president’s rhetoric, but many have seen their wealth grow
DAVOS, Switzerland — One could get the feeling that President Donald Trump might not be set for a rousing welcome when he arrives in this Swiss Alps resort Thursday week to address the annual gathering of the World Economic Forum.
The forum, a pilgrimage for the wealthy and powerful, is an unabashed champion of globalization. It advocates ceaselessly for the notion that every problem — from climate change to joblessness to terrorism to cybersecurity — requires international cooperation and multilateral solutions.
Trump’s derisive rejection of such ideas as the woolly-headed notions of the global elite is central to his identity. He used his inaugural address a year ago to declare the dawning of a new “America First” era. He has since pulled the U.S. out of a sprawling Pacific trade deal, while renouncing American participation in the Paris climate accord. His has spurned the modern sensitivities to race and gender.
While many here are poised to recoil at Trump’s arrival — diplomats, heads of state and members of human rights organizations — much of the moneyed elite who pay the bills for many Davos festivities are willing to overlook what they portray as the U.S. president’s rhetorical foibles in favor of focusing on the additional wealth he has delivered to their coffers.
Among banking chiefs, hedge fund managers, private equity overseers and others who make their living managing vast piles of money, Trump represents a rare politician who has made good on his words, having slashed corporate taxes and ditched regulations they view as anti-business. However they publicly greet Trump, they are happy with key ways in which he has wielded his power.
Though many economists assert that the U.S. economic expansion, now into its ninth year, owes much to federal spending unleashed by the Obama administration, the story within the finance community is that Trump’s deregulatory proclivities combined with his $1.5 trillion tax cuts will juice growth.
The business elite are not crazy about Trump’s exchange of nuclear threats with the North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un. They are worried about the U.S. president’s threats to blow up the North American Free Trade Agreement while undermining support for the World Trade Organization, the linchpin of the global, rules-based mode of international commerce.
But they like what Trump has meant for the raging U.S. stock market and, more broadly, enhanced forecasts of global economic growth.
Longtime attendees of the World Economic Forum are prone to discuss — and sometimes lampoon — the values of so-called Davos Man (and Woman), the quintessential attendee who is at once deeply disturbed by the plight of Syrian refugees, at pains to address climate change, and perpetually able to extract new fortune from every situation.
For that crowd, Trump effectively forces a choice. In action and words, he is anathema to the foundational ideals of the forum. He is also making rich people richer, and many of them are here.
“They are now licking their lips,” said Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel laureate economist. “Davos Man has been able to overlook Trump’s ‘America First’ rhetoric, his anti-climate change action, his protectionism, nativism, racism, bigotry, narcissism, misogyny, for the lucre that seems to be the true motivating force behind Davos Man.”