After the Davos World Economic Forum

In reading what happened at the 2023 Forum in Davos, I wanted to compile how the world intend to tackle its biggest issues this year so we can compare with reality a year from now... 

The economy we are told is not as bad as thought before the forum and the global outlook will in fact be better than feared, but of course, no one want to spook the planet with bad news and create a self-fulfilling prophecy!

Ukraine, the second topic of importance, was all about getting the invaded country weapons to defend itself, but no one has the foggiest idea how long the conflict will last and what kind of outcome we are likely to see. No one voiced my opinion that the only solution resides in getting rid of Putin. 

On trade, we seem to go away from globalism and wealthy groups nations like the US, Europe and China are defending and pushing their industrial policies, seemingly at the expense of weaker nations. 

After having a good, super profitable year, oil and fossil fuel producers are still counting on wealthy countries to pay for the climate destruction in non-polluting countries when they should be the ones to foot the bill, as the UN General Secretary discovered a few days ago. 

As far as the Tech industry goes, the big topic was the importance of artificial intelligence in a background of layoffs of tens of thousands of employees globally, as the industry is under enormous cost pressure and needs to find ways to do things cheaper. 

China for its part declared that it was open again for business with a growth forecast of 4.5% according to Crédit Suisse. We’ll see… 

Fighting inflation worldwide is another challenge that also takes place in the context of open competition between Europe and America and that has lagging economic effects... 

Finally the anticipated financial slowdown has global financial institutions grappling with how to right-size for a slowdown, while dealing with a host of other challenges, including financing the global transition to a greener future much faster than has happened so far. Other events related to geopolitics and cybersecurity risks are further adding to the complexity. 

Overall, consensus was hard to reach at the Forum and it will be interesting to see, in a year, how close reality these vague, general directions will be…