On December 20, 2021, the world elite experienced a great disappointment. His favorite annual meeting, scheduled for January 17 to 20, was canceled in extremis due to the viral proliferation of Covid-19 in the Swiss mountains. Klaus Schwab, the indestructible and severe creator of the Davos summit, bringing together in the same alpine place nearly 3,000 big bosses and world political leaders, tried everything to save his event. Death in the soul, he resolved to virtualize it. In front of the screens, a skewer of powerful paraded, starring Xi Jinping, the Chinese president, dressed for the occasion as a defender of international trade and openness to the wider world.
But it wasn’t Davos. A horror, even, for the columnist of the British daily FinancialTimes Henry Mance, who quipped: “Nobody became a billionaire to attend an Ursula von der Leyen webinar. » Davos is a necessarily physical community, where we network and commune in optimism to solve the ills of the planet. As the place of the theorization of an enormous “at the same time”, where one can at the same time make a fortune, help the poor and save the planet.
This is why the smile returned quickly, when Klaus Schwab announced, on January 21, the holding of a “real” Davos in the spring. It would take place from May 22 to 26. The atmosphere in this month of this very beginning of the year 2022 was that of a way out of the crisis. “Despite the current Covid pandemic, world leaders have never been more optimistic in the past decade about improving economic growth for the year ahead”affirmed then the annual study of the consulting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC).
Traditionally, before each summit, the latter probes the moods of the big bosses. And, icing on the cake, the champions of good humor are these incorrigible French killjoys. Indeed, 85% of them said, in January, to have confidence in the evolution of the economy, a jump of 26 points compared to 2020, unheard of on the scale of euphoria. “We were coming out of a major crisis with unexpected situations, such as confinement, and the shared feeling of a very strong rebound after the ordeal”, testifies Jean-Pierre Clamadieu, the president of Engie. Some even spoke of a return to the “glorious thirties”, with the endless pursuit of central bank intervention.
Change in monetary policy
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