The mood at Davos in the desert is one of anxiety
IN SOME ways, davos-in-the-desert.html” title=”Anxiety Dominates the Mood at Davos in the Desert”>big business pow-wows are all alike. Talking heads make over-the-top predictions. The world’s problems are packaged into bite-sized quotes. Chief executives vie to use as many words as they can to say as little as possible. So too at the seventh Future Investment Initiative in Saudi Arabia’s capital, Riyadh, on October 24th-26th.
Dancers in space-age suits rocked the stage and a young operatic star wowed the audience at the opening session. Large futuristic screens flashed buzzwords du jour—AI, data, sustainability—in an arena fit for e-sports. Corporate and financial bigwigs engaged in a pretend boardroom dialogue at a roundtable in the centre of the conference’s main hall to discuss the state of the world. Drones hovered overhead.
But Davos in the desert, as the event is better known, is singular. Unlike at others, including its European namesake, billions of dollars in deals get signed on the sidelines. It is also even harder to get in. This year, for the first time, the organisers charged a fee of as much as $15,000 per person—steep as talkfests go. That, as one financier put it, filtered for “more high-quality people”.
2023-10-26 07:35:33
Original from www.economist.com
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