It’s World Economic Forum time!
This is one of my favorite conferences as the Global Elite head over for their annual gathering and schmooze-fest where they end up wandering around and trying to get seats with the cool people at lunch and trying to find out where the good parties are and getting told there’s no tables at the restaurant they want to go to – just like normal people! Nassim N. Taleb described it to Tom Keene of Bloomberg Television, the event is “chasing successful people who want to be seen with other successful people. That’s the game.”
The minimum price for admission to the conference is $50,000 for a membership to the World Economic Forum plus a $20,000 ticket to the conference so $70,000 before trying to get a hotel room at a place you won’t be embarrassed to mention to the other guests. Getting to Davos is also a nightmare at the best of times but worth it for the skiing, if not the schmoozing. In short, it’s group of people who have at least $80,000 to blow on a weekend sitting around discussing the problems ordinary folks like themselves face in the ever-changing global economy.
The event will be well-covered and we will get many, many sound-bytes during the week and, like any conference, there is sure to be some enlightening information if you are lucky enough to catch the right lecture but I’d probably enjoy it a lot more if someone sent Ricky Gervais to ask a lot of awkward questions and point out what BS this exercise is than having to spend another week watching the CNBC girls throw their panties at passing Billionaires.
Meanwhile, in the real World, the UK’s GDP CONTRACTED by 0.5% in Q4. “Even allowing for a very substantial hit to economic activity from December’s severe weather, contraction of 0.5% quarter-on-quarter … is extremely disappointing and worrying,” said Howard Archer, chief European and U.K. economist at IHS Global Insight. An Office for National Statistics official said extreme weather at the end of the 2010—which resulted in the coldest December in over 100 years—was likely to have been the main cause of the contraction, with services and construction particularly hard hit. As usual, economists were clueless with the average prediction for a 0.4% expansion missing by over 200%. That sent the Pound ($1.358) and the…
