Davos: Two Worlds, Ready Or Not (The Baseline Scenario)
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By Simon Johnson
On the fringes of the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos this week, there was plenty of substantive discussion – including about the dangers posed by our “too big to fail”/”too big to save” banks, the consequences of widening inequality (reinforced by persistent unemployment in some countries), and why the jobs picture in the U.S. looks so bad.
But in the core keynote events and more generally around any kind of CEO-related interaction, such themes completely failed to resonate. There is, of course, variation in views across CEOs and the people work intellectual agendas on their behalf, but still the mood among this group was uniformly positive – it was hard to detect any note of serious concern.
Many of the people who control the world’s largest corporations are quite comfortable with the status quo post-financial crisis. This makes sense for them – and poses a major problem for the rest of us.