Davos Day Five: The Forum Ends. Bankers Relax.

Davos 2010 is done, over, kaput. What happened on the last day of the World Economic Forum? An unscientific roundup of stuff that caught our attention:

Pity the Bankers at Davos

As the 2010 edition of the World Economic Forum ended today, the general theme in reports was that this was not a year to be a banker in Davos. “Davos 2010 ends with bankers on the defensive,” said a BBC.com headline. “At Davos, Bankers Are on the Run,” said a story in The Wall Street Journal. London’s Times chimed in with the story “Davos: Fear and loathing in the Alps,” though it subtitled the piece “The bankers begin to fight back aginst (sic) the tide in Davos.”

Our favorite tidbit of banker bashing came from the Journal, which quoted an unnamed London-based investment banker who said he was prepared to bet millions that Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankein would be out of his job in two years. Goldman’s response? "It is preposterous that The Wall Street Journal would even consider publishing such effluent,” said Goldman spokesman Lucas van Praag. Preposterous, maybe. Entertaining, definitely.

WTO Deal Unlikely

Trade ministers from about 20 countries gathered on the sidelines in Davos with the aim of furthering the current Doha Round of World Trade Organization talks. But the world’s biggest economy was conspicuously underrepresented. The Obama administration sent only an assistant ambassador to the talks, feeding frustration that the U.S. really isn’t all that interested in more trade talks, the Washington Post reports. "I don't think very much came out of this meeting unfortunately," Egyptian Foreign Minister Rachid Mohamed Rachid told the Post. "If we don't have the participation at ministerial or even ambassador level from the United States, of course it doesn't give us a positive signal."

Exports Aren’t the Answer

Too many of the world’s leaders are fooling themselves into believing they can export their way to recovery. That was the take from the International Monetary Fund’s managing director, Dominique Strauss-Kahn. In an interview with the Financial Times at Davos, Strauss-Kahn said demand for imports was unlikely to keep up with all the country’s looking to export their way out of economic hardship. That statement fits with some of what President Obama has said over the past year: Essentially, the rest of the world can no longer expect Americans to whip out their credit cards and buy everybody else’s goods. In other words, the world better get used to balancing domestic demand with exports. That may be a hard lesson for some.

China, Google Confrontation Conspicuously Absent

Here’s a little item from Reuters that caught our eye about what wasn’t discussed this year. There was apparently plenty of hallway chatter about China’s internet censorship, and Google’s very public statements that it would stop playing ball with such censorship and may shut down its China operations as a result. But the confrontation was nowhere on the public agenda. Was that because organizers didn’t want to offend delicate Chinese sensibilities? “We raise issues where we know we can make a positive contribution to them,” Klaus Schwab, founder of the forum, told Reuters. “This is an issue that is still cooking and we don’t think we could have made a positive contribution on it.” So the best thing to do in the face of censorship is to just shut up. How gutsy, Klaus.