It may be the first well-informed panel I’ve ever moderated, in the sense that you all know you don’t know anything. The FT’s Martin Wolf, midway through a discussion with Montek Ahluwalia, deputy chairman of the Indian Planning Commission; Mark Carney, governor of the Bank of Canada; Christine LaGarde, finance minister of France; John Lipsky, [...]
The Tayyip Erdogan-Shimon Peres rumble last night was partly about Gaza. But it was also about the limitations of panel moderation at Davos. I don’t mean to single out David Ignatius, whose failure to keep Israeli President Peres from vastly exceeding his allotted time apparently incensed the Turkish prime minister. I had been at another [...]
My report on the day one TIME Board of Economists’ session at Davos is in the new international edition(s) of TIME and online here. It begins: Last year, the annual gathering of TIME’s Board of Economists on the first day of the World Economic Forum in Davos was dominated by a debate over just how [...]
One of the major themes of the World Economic Forum this year and every year is “Full payment required in advance.” This, more than anything else, explains why the show is going on in somewhat inappropriate style here in the midst of global economic crisis. Sponsors’ dollars were already in, hotel rooms were already paid [...]
The PayPal co-founder, Facebook investor, and manager of the hedge fund Clarium Capital Managment had a far better year than most in 2008 (Thiel says Clarium was flat for the year). So where does he think things are headed? What has surprised you most over the past year? In a weird way I was most [...]
Earlier today I was talking with Donald Grimes, an economist at the University of Michigan, and we got to playing around with some data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis. He was making the argument that a lot of the things in the stimulus bill meant to help people whose livelihoods are threatened—things like extending [...]
Values is a very fashionable word here at Davos this week. A lot of people seem to agree with Tony Blair’s assessment that the current financial crisis is the result of a neglect of ethical and moral values in the financial world. Bill Gates doesn’t. “I don’t think the failure was fundamentally an ethical failure,” [...]
Tony Blair says he recently ran into an old friend from his leftie university days.”Ah, I told you,” his friend said. “I told you capitalism is going to end.” Blair doesn’t buy it. “The free enterprise system as a whole has not failed,” he says. “The financial system has failed. … We’ve been taught a [...]
This is the first in a series (I hope) of three-question interviews from Davos. I’ve been stationed on the same sofa in the Davos Kongresszentrum all day writing an article for the magazine, but I did manage to have a chat this morning with the guy on the next sofa over, Federico Sturzenegger. Sturzenegger is [...]
It’s morning in Davos, and the 2009 edition of the World Economic Forum has finally begun. Oh frabjous day! TIME’s annual economics panel—featuring World Bank chief economist Justin Yifu Lin, South African Finance Minister Trevor Manuel, Morgan Stanley Asia chairman (and former chief economist) Stephen Roach, Turkish industrialist Ferit Sahenk (chairman of Dogus Group), Keio [...]
