Friday, January 26, 2001
What the Men Who Run the World Are Thinking
Fears of a global slump may dominate the Davos gathering of the world's
economic and political heavyweights
BY TONY KARON
The straphanger standing on the bus because he couldn't get a seat is George
Soros, the global financier who has the power to destroy a whole Asian
economy with the click of a mouse. That guy in the pizza parlor who looks
like Bill Gates — chances are it in fact is the world's richest man. The
bearded guy who just skidded awkwardly by on the icy sidewalk — Saudi oil
minister Ali Bin Ibrahim Al-Naimi, who with a couple of words into his a cell
phone could drive up the price of gasoline at your local pump by 20 cents
within a month.
There's something more than a little surreal about the World Economic Forum's
annual get-together in the Swiss ski resort of Davos, which opened on
Thursday. Davos is a conspiracy theorist's dream. Its participants — scores
of heads of state and senior ministers, representatives of 1,000 of the
world's biggest corporations and an eclectic assortment of economists, social
critics, writers, artists and thinkers — may reflect an unparalleled
concentration of political and economic power, and yet the event has no
formal mandate or decision-making power. In fact, it's not even strictly a
conference, by the organizers' definition, but rather a more informal
gathering of the people who run the world to discuss the big picture — the
really, really big picture, about where the world is headed. And attendance
is strictly by invitation only, a fact underlined by the largest deployment
in decades of the traditionally neutral Swiss army, to keep at bay the
thousands of anti-globalization protesters who would dearly love to spoil the
party.
Organizers this year are making a concerted effort to focus on some of the
concerns of the demonstrators they're working so hard to keep away. The focus
is on bridging the gap between rich and poor, addressing the debt burden on
developing countries and engaging critics of globalization. Representatives
of African governments are expected to promote their development plans and
make a pitch for investment. Many of those topics may have been conceived
after last year's event, which was dogged by protesters and at which
President Clinton sounded a note of caution amid a celebration of the wonders
of the New Economy. Clinton had been burned only months earlier by the World
Trade Organization debacle in Seattle, in which the combination of
anti-globalization street protests and discord among the member states had
prevented any progress in negotiating a new round of trade liberalization
measures. He devoted his acclaimed speech to the need to ensure that the
world's impoverished majority benefited from the promise of globalization.
The minds of the participants may be even more acutely focused this year, on
the anticipated slowdown in the U.S. economy and its global implications.
And, of course, the veterans of those failed WTO trade talks will be inclined
to use the demonstration-free environment to huddle over ways of resolving
the disputes that divide the world's two biggest trading blocs, the U.S. and
the E.U. The Europeans are concerned that the incoming Bush administration —
which won't have a high-profile presence at Davos — plans to prioritize trade
agreements with Latin America, and they fear that a U.S. economic slowdown
may increase pressure on the White House to play hardball in future trade
talks.
The conference's program may be structured to help focus the minds of the men
who run the world (and yes, it is run mostly by men) on the problems of
poverty, the digital divide, environmental challenges and other challenges of
the future. But the organizers may find that such concerns are more easily
dealt with at moments when the power brokers are feeling flush and confident.
This time around, most of their attention may be focused on trying to read
the message in the clouds gathering on the horizon of the world economy.
