Davos: Round-Up



"People are 'depressed and traumatized,' Rupert Murdoch, chief executive of News Corp. noted on the first full day of the World Economic Forum in Davos, adding that worldwide some '$50 trillion of personal wealth' had vanished since the crisis worsened with the Sept. 15 collapse of Lehman Bros. Co. 'The size of the problem confronting us today is larger than in the 1930s,' said billionaire philanthropist George Soros. The scope of the decline was evident even among the gift bags that attendees — who pay thousands of dollars to participate — received this year. Instead of loaded personal digital assistants, fine Swiss chocolates and gadgets they got basic, blue-hued pedometers instead." (AP)

And an interesting exchange between Michael Dell and Putin:

"Someone tell that to Vladimir Putin. After the Russian President delivered a didactic 40-minute speech to fellow Davos attendees that touched on everything from the place of the US dollar in global financial markets to Russia's role as an energy producer, he agreed to take a few questions. Michael Dell took the mike. Ever the salesman, Michael laid it on thick with praise for Russian technology, and then asked Putin 'how can we help.' Putin was having none of it. Fortune reports from the scene.

"Putin's withering reply to Dell: 'We don't need help. We are not invalids. We don't have limited mental capacity.' The slapdown took many of the people in the audience by surprise. Putin then went on to outline some of the steps the Russian government has taken to wire up the country, including remote villages in Siberia. And, in a final dig at Dell, he talked about how Russian scientists were rightly respected not for their hardware, but for their software."

"One of the secrets of Davos (we'll let you in to more of them as the week progresses) is that there's no easy way to get here. (And of course, once you're here, you're stuck - that's another secret.) The private jet crowd can't make it - they have to take helicopters, which are at the vagaries of the weather. And when it really snows, which it can, you're in trouble. I remember Al Gore coming here in 1999, I think it was, when he had to do the last bit of the journey on foot. The drive from Zurich is better now that Klosters has been bypassed with a bridge and tunnel, but the real way to get here is by train, which is what I did tonight. (Sans luggage; God knows where that is, but it means I can't join Justin on the slopes.) It takes three hours. You change twice from Zurich airport, eventually snaking through the dark mountains on a local with trees and snowdrifts pressing in on you. I read Nassim Taleb's Black Swan on the way (I'm moderating a dinner with him later in the week) and, so far, the takeaway from the book is: I don't know anything. So that was uplifting." (Davos.Time)

"China's economy has been hit hard by the global financial crisis, which was partly caused by the unsustainable economic models of certain countries, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao said in a keynote speech at the World Economic Forum on Wednesday .. He cited among the causes of the crisis: 'Inappropriate macroeconomic policies of some economies and their unsustainable model of development characterised by prolonged low savings and high consumption.'" (Reuters)