USA Today offered five highlights from the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland. They are:
1. EU's monetary stimulus (economic tampering)
2. Ukraine (global government tampering)
3. CEO & global leader behind the scenes discussions (efforts to produce economic tampering and global tampering that accrues to the individual's advantage)
4. Death of Saudi King Abdullah
5. The lack of progress in gender parity at Davos (expect the same or worse from this crowd on economic parity)
FT reported the price for global business leaders to attend WEF will rise 20% next year:
Strategic partners will have to pay SFr600,000 ($680,526) annually to send five people to the Davos conference, the 2015 edition of which concluded on Saturday.How many middle class jobs will be eliminated to fund the $113,400 annual increase over 120 companies, which totals $13.6 million? Using $40,000 annual income as the benchmark WEF's price increase could eliminate 340 middle class jobs next year.
Most executives said that coming to Davos, even at the higher price, was less costly than flying to meet far-flung clients, who instead come to Switzerland for an intense few days of meetings.
Private equity is virtually a nation unto itself and it plans to fund more infrastructure projects. Ventures Africa reported on Davos:
David M. Rubenstein, Co-Founder and Co-Chief Executive Officer, Carlyle Group, USA, said that since governments and banks are no longer funding infrastructure investments as much as they did in the past, more and more infrastructure projects will be funded by private equity. “Right now the US seems the greatest place in the world in which to invest,” he said. However, he cautioned that economic growth there is leaving many behind, especially in middle- and lower-income groups.
It's by design in our global PEU nation. (PEU is short for private equity underwriter, my pet name for the greed/leverage boys.)
Update 1-26-15: Haaretz did a beautiful job describing the various Davos men. WaPo gave a different take but essentially said "Davos men" will don whatever stripes necessary to benefit themselves.
Update 1-27-15: Nonprofit Quarterly saw through Davos' front stage behavior in their insightful piece.
Update 2-13-15: Pew Research conducted a poll on who or what is to blame for inequality? People in our survey identify many culprits, but the top offender is government. Across the 44 nations polled, a median of 29% say their government’s economic policies are the most important reason for the wealth gap
