Always Bet Against Davos Man
This year, everyone here is bullish on MAGA. That’s your cue to take the other side of the trade.
DAVOS, Switzerland — Eight years ago, Davos Man mocked Donald Trump. Five years ago, he despised Trump. But in 2025, the mood at the World Economic Forum has completely changed.
The great American vibe shift has made it to Davos, and the European business elite badly wants a piece of it. Two days of trudging up and down the Promenade—the main drag of the Swiss ski resort town where the WEF is held each year—were enough to convince me of that.
True, the WEF propaganda remains fixated on Environmental, Social, and Governance issues, and, of course, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion—the familiar, woke-globalist acronyms ESG and DEI, now supplemented with AI. The corporate billboards still burble their word salads about resilience and sustainability. But talk to the chief executives and a very different picture emerges.
Almost everyone at Davos is long U.S., short EU. The new Davos consensus is that Europe cannot get its economic act together and never will, whereas America is rocking and rolling, and if you don’t own the big U.S. tech stocks, then the FOMO may kill you. Börje Ekholm, the CEO of Swedish telecom firm Ericsson, told one interviewer that he was fed up with Europe’s “regulatory-first approach.” I heard the same thing again and again. “Europe is always lagging behind,” complained Zurich Insurance Group CEO Mario Greco. Vasant Narasimhan, who runs the Swiss pharmaceutical firm Novartis, agreed.
“It’s Europe that needs Elon,” one of the Continent’s biggest asset managers said at a lunch I attended. “Individually, each European regulation seems okay but, like the drinks in the cocktail bar, if you mix them all together, it tastes nasty.” Someone needs to Make Europe Great Again, says Davos Man. Sure, last year, Mario Draghi produced a report on EU competitiveness that made some concrete suggestions. But whoever made anything great again with a report?
The trouble is that the Davos consensus is nearly always wrong.
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