No Ordinary Davos
In case anyone hadn’t noticed that Donald Trump was set to dominate this week’s World Economic Forum, the White House incumbent just ensured maximum airtime there by sparking a possible transatlantic trade war that rocked the western alliance.
Fresh from deposing the leader of Venezuela and restating his desire to annex Greenland, the US president’s new tariff threats against European allies opposing that goal — and their counter-threats of levies on $108 billion of US goods — have turned the annual gathering of the global elite into the potential scene of a geopolitical showdown.
Last year, just after Trump’s inauguration, the meeting in Davos was replete with hopes and fears for his second stint at the White House. A few weeks later, he rocked markets with his “Liberation Day” tariffs before spending most of 2025 in extended trade talks with the rest of the world.
This time round, participants are contemplating a new confrontation knowing more about Trump’s combative nature, with the stakes even higher.
“This is yet more surprise, more chaos, more unpredictability,” HSBC executive Michael Roberts told Bloomberg Television. “This one however is not just a ‘Liberation Day’ — this is obviously politically driven.”
Trump’s address to Davos on Wednesday — during only his third visit as president — will be its most-watched calendar item. With several Group of Seven peers expected in the Swiss resort too, tension will be in the air.
However the week pans out, it’s clearer than ever that the world is operating under different assumptions from those that prevailed when the WEF was established in the 1970s, or even the situation last year, as Sridhar Natarajan and Mark Bergen explain in today’s Big Take.
“The rules-based system most of us grew up with, that businesses got used to — that is gone,” said former UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak. “The quicker everyone recognizes it, the better.”
What is also true is that the forum remains a big deal. Despite years of soul searching by so-called Davos Man on the relevance of an event glorifying globalization in a fracturing global economy, the gathering is still a huge draw.
Aside from more than 60 world leaders, this year’s speakers will include big-name business chiefs such as Nvidia Corp’s Jensen Huang, JPMorgan’s Jamie Dimon and Exxon Mobil’s Darren Woods.
Meanwhile, for all the attention that the US president might grab, some attendees taking the longer view are sanguine about his appetite for disruption. Franklin Templeton Chief Executive Officer Jenny Johnson recalls how the “Liberation Day” selloff preceded a Trump climbdown.
“We came out pretty OK on the tariffs,” she told Bloomberg TV. “We’ll get through this.”