The social club for the very powerful is still drawing plenty of power brokers, but some big names are staying away.
While there are 52 heads of state of government heading to Davos this year, top-tier leaders are missing. U.S. President Joe Biden and his Chinese and Russian counterparts Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin are all giving it a miss.
French President Emmanuel Macron, who promised to Make the Planet Great Again, is also skipping the talkfest, along with new British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and re-elected Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.
Instead, it’s a European-heavy guest list: German Chancellor Olaf Scholz is the only leader from a G7 country, sharing top billing with European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, another German.
Davos always drew more Germans than anyone else. These days it has to settle for….
The U.S. delegation includes cabinet members such as climate envoy John Kerry, who will camp out in Davos for most of the week, but others such as Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen are skipping.
John Kerry. That’s like sending an invitation to the family next door and having them send their idiot cousin who doesn’t even live there.
At least South African President Cyril Ramaphosa will be there. And who can miss that?
Part of the issue is that Davos is becoming toxic. Times are tough and nobody really wants to be seen hobnobbing with the elites when people can’t afford bread, milk or eggs.
That doesn’t mean that anything has substantively changed. The elite circuit is huge, but this particular stop for the private jets may have peaked.
They already pull the strings, so sending top tier people merely points to their obvious influence on the politics of the world. I think that this just means that they don’t actually need to show their obvious faces now that they’ve actually gotten some essential controls over the doings of nations and groups across the globe.
I hope you are wrong. I fear you are right.
Mr. Greenfield has been writing some hopeful pieces lately, and he should be encouraged to do so, despite the deeply cynical crowd to which I belong.
A very dangerous Mutual Admiration Society.
Hard to imagine the strange world these wierdos live in. All so impressed with themselves, and with one another.
A bunch of political parasites.
No more Heinz Pickles(or any other product of Heinz)!
If only that supercilious, self indulgent, self important, condescending fop John (“I served in Vietnam”) were pushing up some daisies instead of endlessly pontificating at every pointless minute and hour. What a useless piece of overly garrulous pompous trash.
Correction,….That’s John Kerry. Sorry.
It’s okay. Everybody probably understood what you meant anyway.
Its funny that Rishi Sunak is giving it a miss considering the WEF tanked the British Pound so his predecessor would fail after six weeks allowing him to step in.
They are not there, because they no longer need to be there. The seeds have been sown, the dirty work done, and the momentum is unstoppable.
Daniel can you write more about the elite circuit and how they deliberate, build consensus, plan, resolve internal goals and what their ultimate objectives are?
They’re just a bunch of sorority sisters congratulating themselves for being themselves.