“Both optimists and pessimists contribute to society. The optimist invents the aeroplane, the pessimist the parachute.” ― George Bernard Shaw ||
Hello everyone! I hope you’re all doing well, avoiding whiplash from the pace of events or eyeburn from spending too much time scrolling. What a time to be alive, seriously.
Today I take a break from obsessing about what Trump is or isn’t doing, and focus on signals of global shifts emanating from a small Swiss town high in the mountains, and what they mean for crypto.
IN THIS NEWSLETTER:
Davos still matters for crypto, just not the way you think
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WHAT I’M WATCHING:
Davos still matters for crypto, just not the way you think
With the hubbub of the US presidential inauguration yesterday, the annual jamboree in Davos feels particularly irrelevant.
But we do still have to check in on it, if only to confirm that the global “elite” still think talking about change helps them to take charge of it.
Thin mountain air
This edition of the annual World Economic Forum (WEF) conference is absent many key figures: the presidents of China, India, France and Turkey are not attending, nor are the prime ministers of Japan, the UK and Italy. The only representative from the G7 is outgoing German leader Olaf Scholz and, according to reports, only five other countries from the 27-member EU bloc have bothered to make the relatively short trip to the Swiss mountains.
The head of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, is in attendance, though, as are the heads of the IMF, the UN, the World Health Organization and the World Trade Organization, so there’s that.
And there’ll be plenty to talk about, because the theme this year is “Collaboration for the Intelligent Age”, whatever that means – keeping it vague is effective in setting a tone without limiting the subject matter.
The content, according to the organizers, will be split into five “priorities”:
Industries in the Intelligent Age (expect the word “transformation” to be liberally sprinkled around, again)
Reimagining growth (again)
Investing in people (by also investing in AI, I suppose?)
Safeguarding the planet (by being, I guess, “intelligent”?)
Reimagining trust
This last “priority” is easily the most interesting, on many fronts.
One is because last year the whole theme was “rebuilding trust”. That obviously didn’t pan out too well (I know, these themes are not roadmaps or even plans, but we can take them as goals), so now we are on to “reimagining” what the word means, even though we’re not clear what “reimagining” means, either.
And at least there’s continuity: the 2021 theme was also about rebuilding trust. By 2022, the organizers obviously felt a change was needed – after dusting off the thesaurus, they chose “restoring trust”.
So, here we have an elite conference with an understandable obsession about global trust, and yet not a single G7 leader who expects to still be in office a month from now is showing up.
A shifting elite
How is this relevant for crypto?
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