Rebooting Davos Man Nov 11th 2008
From Economist.com
Introducing the Dubai Consensus THE global system “needs a fundamental reboot”.
That was the clearest conclusion from the 700 or so Davos Men and Women gathered in Dubai between November 7th and 9th by the World Economic Forum (WEF) to discuss how to lead the world out of its current crisis.
This computing analogy immediately inspired a series of pointed jokes:
“Before you reboot, make sure the operating system works”;
“First, make sure the power is switched on”, and (to the loudest laughter)
“Let’s hope we don’t end up with another version of Windows.”
Indeed.
Compared with the partying and skiing that accompanies the talking at Davos, this gathering was serious and sober, literally (alcohol not being served, out of respect for the city-state’s Muslim government, which played host to the conference).
“I had people patrolling the beach,” on guard against dignitaries sunbathing, “and I couldn’t find anyone,” said the WEF’s founder, Klaus Schwab, probably in jest.
Everyone agreed that the global crisis, of which the financial system’s meltdown is currently the public face (though fuel and food are also important parts), is the most severe in at least a generation, and could certainly get much worse before it gets better.
A deep recession is regarded as inevitable.
“Could finance be a model for other areas in the sense that no one saw the actual crisis coming?” asked one speaker.
“How long before the world is hit by a pandemic?” asked another.
Opinions were somewhat divided about who has the authority to solve the crisis.
“This is the same elite that caused the problem, not the group to find the solution”, observed one brave speaker.
“There is no leader in the world who can pull this together,” said another.
A third speaker rallied the majority, however, by asking,
“If not us, who?” Already, a new lexicon is emerging for the rebooting phase.
This is a “leadership moment”.
Global co-ordinated action is needed.
The unthinkable must be thought.
Business as usual is no longer an option.
What is needed is “restorative innovation.”
Solutions should be the result of multi-stakeholder engagement, with everyone having a seat at the table. Risks must be better measured, and better managed.
Solutions should be transformational, and sustainable. “Silos” are bad.
Thinking holistically, connectedly, outside of our silos, is essential.
In practical terms, this probably means that critics of capitalism will be given a more respectful hearing at elite gatherings than they were in the go-go years of growth.
Ideas that have been around the fringes of the policymaking mainstream for years will now move towards centre-stage, at least in the talking if not yet in the doing.
Idealistic social entrepreneurs will be taken more seriously, such as Jack Sim, founder of the World Toilet Organisation, who argued in Dubai that in future the focus should be on the “competitiveness of virtues”.
Even the chief statistician of the OECD called for better measures of the progress than the traditional yardstick provided by GDP thereby adopting a cause that used to be a hobby-horse reserved for environmental activists.
The 700 were divided ino nearly 70 “Global Agenda Councils”, and encouraged to brainstorm. Intriguing ideas were plentiful, and many were contrarian.
The young, who will soon dominate the labour market, should be included in decision-making, said one speaker. Another proposed the creation of a “global non-profit CNN” to promote better understanding of world affairs.
Another speaker proposed the creation of a WEF Fund to encourage philanthropy, while yet another argued that the financial system needs a regulator like the World Trade Organisation: the global trading rules being the one part of the multilateral system that seems to have survived the various crises of the past year or so in pretty good shape - so far, at least.
Yet the very creation of the WTO seems more miraculous with each new day, and as the politicians who gather for the so-called Bretton Woods 2 conference in the White House this weekend will no doubt discover, creating new multilateral institutions is fiendishly difficult even on paper, let alone in practice.
Overall, beneath the surface, the nasty jolt to the financial markets and now the deepening crisis in the real economy, did not seem to have shaken the faith of Davos Man and Woman in the fundamentals of the old model - hence reboot, not replace
“The crisis is not reflective of a failed economic system; we can still rely on competitive markets, technological advances, and human capital,” said one speaker. “Is capitalism dead?” asked another.
“No. I can tell you it is alive and well in Asia”, at least, he concluded. Ned Phelps, a Nobel prize-winning economist, worried aloud about the “threat of bureaucratising the economy.”
Suzanne Nora Johnson, a rapporteur for several groups of experts looking at the macroeconomic challenge, even argued that an essential ingredient of any solution is ensuring that “nothing can restrain trade, capital-market flows and regulatory arbitrage”.
Perhaps only someone who used to work for Goldman Sachs could nowadays argue in favour of protecting regulatory arbitrage—which many people think helped to cause the current crisis.
The crisis has certainly inspired plenty of passion, not least from Mr Schwab, who urged people to replace the word capitalism with “entrepreneurship in the global public interest” and said the time had come to “create a true movement”, led by those who understand that they “inherited the world not from the past but from our children.”
By January, when the WEF holds its annual meeting in the mountains, it will need to be a lot clearer what that means in practice. For the longer the crisis goes on, the greater the danger that it will prompt a nasty backlash against the good people in Davos and the ideas they hold dear. http://www.economist.com/business/displaystory.cfm?story_id=12586292
THE REPORT FROM IRON MOUNTAIN
This is taken from Chapter 24 of The Creature from Jekyll Island © 2002 by G. Edward Griffin
A PLOT FOR ECONOMIC CRISIS
Maurice Strong believes – or says that he believes – the world's ecosystems can be preserved only if the affluent nations of the world can be disciplined into lowering their standard of living.
Production and consumption must be curtailed.
To bring that about, those nations must submit to rationing, taxation, and political domination by world government.
They will probably not do that voluntarily, he says, so they will have to be forced. To accomplish that, it will be necessary to engineer a global monetary crisis which will destroy their economic systems.
Then they will have no choice but to accept assistance and control from the UN. This strategy was revealed in the May, 1990, issue of West magazine, published in Canada.
In an article entitled “The Wizard of Baca Grande,” journalist Daniel Wood described his week-long experience at Strong's private ranch in southern Colorado.
This ranch has been visited by such CFR notables as David Rockefeller, Secretary-of-State Henry Kissinger, founder of the World Bank Robert McNamara, and the presidents of such organizations as IBM, Pan Am, and Harvard.
During Wood's stay at the ranch, the tycoon talked freely about environmentalism and politics.
To express his own world view, he said he was planning to write a novel about a group of world leaders who decided to save the planet.
As the plot unfolded, it became obvious that it was based on real people and real events.
Wood continues the story: Each year, he explains as background to the telling of the novel's plot, the World Economic Forum convenes in Davos, Switzerland.
Over a thousand CEOs, prime ministers, finance ministers, and leading academics gather in February to attend meetings and set economic agendas for the year ahead.
With this as a setting, he then says: “What if a small group of these world leaders were to conclude that the principal risk to the earth comes from the actions of the rich countries?
And if the world is to survive, those rich countries would have to sign an agreement reducing their impact on the environment. Will they do it? ... The group's conclusion is `no.' the rich countries won't do it. They won't change.
So, in order to save the planet, the group decides: Isn't the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn't it our responsibility to bring that about? …
“This group of world leaders,” he continues, “form a secret society to bring about an economic collapse.
It's February.
They're all at Davos.
These aren't terrorists.
They're world leaders.
They have positioned themselves in the world's commodity and stock markets.
They've engineered, using their access to stock exchanges and computers and gold supplies, a panic.
Then, they prevent the world's stock markets from closing.
They jam the gears.
They hire mercenaries who hold the rest of the world leaders at Davos as hostages.
The markets can't close.
The rich countries...”
And Strong makes a slight motion with his fingers as if he were flicking a cigarette butt out the window. I sit there spellbound.
This is not any storyteller talking, this is Maurice Strong.
He knows these world leaders.
He is, in fact, co-chairman of the Council of the World Economic Forum.
He sits at the fulcrum of power.
He is in a position to do it.
“I probably shouldn't be saying things like this,” he says. Maurice Strong's fanciful plot probably shouldn't be taken too seriously, at least in terms of a literal reading of future events. It is unlikely they will unfold in exactly that manner – although it is not impossible.
For one thing, it would not be necessary to hold the leaders of the industrialized nations at gun point.
They would be the ones engineering this plot.
Leaders from Third-World countries do not have the means to cause a global crisis.
That would have to come from the money centers in New York, London, or Tokyo. Furthermore, the masterminds behind this thrust for global government have always resided in the industrialized nations.
They have come from the ranks of the CFR in America and from other branches of the International Roundtable in England, France, Belgium, Canada, Japan, and elsewhere.
They are the ideological descendants of Cecil Rhodes and they are fulfilling his dream. It is not important whether or not Maurice Strong's plot for global economic collapse is to be taken literally.
What is important is that men like him are thinking along those lines.
As Wood pointed out, they are in a position to do it.
Or something like it.
If it is not this scenario, they will consider another one with similar consequences.
If history has proven anything, it is that men with financial and political power are quite capable of heinous plots against their fellow men.
They have launched wars, caused depressions, and created famines to suit their personal agendas.
We have little reason to believe that the world leaders of today are more saintly than their predecessors.
Furthermore, we must not be fooled by pretended concern for Mother Earth. The call-to-arms for saving the planet is a gigantic ruse.
There is just enough truth to environmental pollution to make the show “credible,” as The Report from Iron Mountain phrased it, but the end-of-earth scenarios which drive the movement forward are bogus.
The real objective in all of this is world government, the ultimate doomsday mechanism from which there can be no escape.
Destruction of the economic strength of the industrialized nations is merely a necessary prerequisite for ensnaring them into the global web.
The thrust of the current ecology movement is directed totally to that end. http://www.freedomforceinternational.org/pdf/Report_from_Iron_Mountain.pdf
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