The World

As kick-off time approached the crowd for David Cameron was smaller than Sarkozy’s, but Our Man didn’t empty the room with his As to Qs, as Sarkozy had done. He fielded the questions himself, they weren’t planted (or didn’t seem to be), so in the second half England edged ahead. As was evident last year, with the Davos audience Cameron has a certain je ne sais quoi.

One rhetorical trope which never fails to irritate is the trite observation that “now is not the time for complacency”. Nods all round the room. I have often thought it would be provocative, for once, to hear a speaker say that today, indeed, is the perfect moment to be complacent, to relax one’s guard, and to engage in a comforting bout of self-congratulation.

I never thought that happy moment would arrive, but it did today in a session on risk, where three Anglo-American CEOs told us that their corporations had risk management all figured out. Capital is perfectly allocated to risk, and they were confident that systemic crises could be prevented in the future. So governments and regulators have to “move on” (a favourite Blairite phrase). In other words, all these dangerous ideas about resolution regimes or, horror of horrors, breaking up huge banks should be abandoned. Big banks can attract better risk managers. Small ones won’t have good chief risk officers.

This year’s Davos started with the wrong sort of bang, as the Domodedovo bomb kept President Medvedev at home and deprived the conference of its first star turn. With the continuing uncertainty about who will stand for the presidency in Moscow next year, there was unusual interest in how he performed. We shall see if he is able to reschedule later in the week. That would create a logistical challenge for Klaus Schwab and his team.

And the mood of the plucky British team on their way up the mountain was severely dented by the dismal output figures for the last quarter of 2010. There were special features, of course, as George Osborne has  said to anyone with ears to hear, but it is somehow harder to persuade people in a ski resort which functions happily in all manner of climatic conditions that a couple of snow storms and a cold snap threw a 60 m people economy so far off track. Cameron and Osborne will face some sceptical audiences when they appear. The US administration, which cannot easily present a plausible fiscal plan itself, may be privately pleased that Britain’s austerity experiment, as they like to call it, is looking a bit iffy.