If it's the last week in January, it must be time for the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, the business world's most exclusive talking shop.
Around 1,600 businessmen and 900 representatives of government, religion and other strands of civil society will make their way up the mountain paths to the Swiss resort to try to make sense of such things as last year's upheavals in the Middle East, the euro zone crisis and Japan's storm damage.
Once again, the forum looks likely to be a clash of emerging-market optimism and developed-market angst. A report by accountants Grant Thornton published earlier this month showed 47% of chief executives in the four largest emerging countries were optimistic about the coming year, compared with only 14% of in the seven largest economies of the developed world.
One safe bet for this year is another round of feisty exchanges between bankers and politicians, over who is more to blame for the debt-related problems in the U.S. and Europe.
"As the world grows increasingly complex and interdependent, many of those risks are simultaneously reaching a tipping point," says WEF chairman Klaus Schwab, tapping a report co-authored for the forum by reinsurance group Swiss Re AG, Tte Wyman Group and Zurich Financial Services AG.
The report recites a litany of risks faced by the global economy, including cyber-terrorism, the depletion of water resources and a demographics-induced collapse of Western societies.
Even allowing for the tendency of insurers and consultants to talk up risks in a sales pitch for their services, there is one risk that will be on everybody's mind: the collapse of the euro zone. Citigroup Inc. chairman Vikram Pandit warned last week that the ongoing euro crisis could take anything between 0.5% and 1.5% off U.S. growth this year. German Chancellor Angela Merkel is due to give this year's keynote address Wednesday, and European Central Bank President Mario Draghi will make an appearance on Friday.
Away from Europe, there is plenty of optimism around too. The Dow Jones Industrial Average is only 2% away from a four-year high, buoyed the last month's US economic data, the evidence of a 'soft landing' in China and the tentative hope that the ECB's latest rescue operations will rule out major bank failures in Europe this year.
Overall, a quarter of the WEF's delegates will be from the U.S., divided among Wall Street and hedge funds, corporate CEOs, academics, consultants and media.
read more: Olympus Wealth Management
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