“Always Bet Against the Davos Man”, By NIALL FERGUSON
“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.”
Always Bet Against the Davos Man
This year, everyone here is bullish on MAGA. That’s your cue to take the other side of the trade.
01.23.25 — Politics, International, and Economics
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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. I still remember the way it was five years ago. It was clear to me—and I told everyone who would listen—that a global pandemic was underway. But what was the dominant topic on the agenda of the World Economic Forum? That’s right: climate change and how morally superior Greta Thunberg was to wicked Donald Trump. So, if Davos Man is, despite his qualms, long America and short Europe, that might be your cue to take the other side of the trade.
Despite the predictable concerns of the 23 Nobel laureate economistswho endorsed Kamala Harris last year, the risk to the U.S. economy does not lead from tariffs to inflation. The real risk is from the deficit to the bond market. The total federal debt exceeds 120 percent, double its level in the mid-1990s. The deficit Trump has inherited from Joe Biden is above 6 percent of GDP, a staggering number for an economy at nearly full employment. Debt-servicing costs now, for the first time, exceed the defense budget, a violation of Ferguson’s Law, which states, “Any great power that spends more on interest payments than on defense will not remain a great power for very long.”
Why did the United States not suffer the recession that nearly all economists predicted in 2023 as a result of rate hikes by the Federal Reserve? Partly it was because Biden ran such huge deficits. The way the Treasury financed the borrowing—by issuing short-term paper—also partly offset the Fed’s tightening, as Nouriel Roubini and Stephen Miran have pointed out. But it was also, as Sahil Mahtani and others have argued, because the virtually open southern border flooded the U.S. economy with cheap labor in the form of roughly eight million immigrants.
The incoming Treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, has pledged to reduce the deficit by half to 3 percent of GDP. Either he is going to miss by a mile, and the extension of the 2017 tax cuts is going to overwhelm whatever gains in revenue come from deregulation and whatever cuts in spending come from greater government efficiency, or the U.S. is heading from fiscal expansion to fiscal tightening. As for the macroeconomic impact of an open border, that is clearly over, even before the deportations begin.
The indicator to watch is the 10-year Treasury yield—the long-term interest rate on government debt. Over the past three months, it has risen by half a percentage point. If it goes up further, things can get nasty for both the budget (as the costs of debt service rise) and for stocks (as investors start to discount future cash flows at a higher rate). Remember, Trump was sworn in with the S&P 500 at a record high, above 6,000. U.S. stocks—especially six of the Magnificent Seven—are eye-poppingly expensive relative to the rest of the world’s equity markets, even as these companies shell out half a trillion a year in capital expenditure on data centers and the other hardware that AI requires.
Bank of America expects the S&P to return 0-1 percent a year for the next decade—“a catastrophic investment prospect,” in the words of James Mackintosh of the Wall Street Journal. BCA Research analyst Peter Berezin predicts that the S&P will drop to 4,452 by the end of next year—a decline of close to 26 percent. To believe that the bull market will keep on keeping on, you have to believe in an immediate productivity miracle from the deployment of AI. I believe the productivity gains will come, as the bots replace the employees in call centers and back offices, but not nearly that fast.
Let me add two more big drops of rain on the Promenade parade. Since Adam Smith, economists have mostly seen free trade and the rule of law as beneficial for growth. Not only have we now entered a period of extreme uncertainty about the future path of U.S. trade policy (does Trump really mean to jack up tariffs on Canada, Mexico, and China on February 1, or are the threats just a negotiating tactic?), but we also appear to have jettisoned the rule of law in the euphoria of the monarchical moment.
It is not just Trump’s executive order suspending a law to ban TikTok that was passed by Congress, signed by his predecessor, and upheld by the Supreme Court. Trump has also issued a blanket pardon to all those convicted of crimes—including assaults on police officers—committed on January 6, 2021. And he has issued an executive order overturning the birthright citizenship most people had long assumed was enshrined in the Fourteenth Amendment.
But the truly disturbing thing to my eyes is that the assault on the rule of law has been bipartisan. And it is at least arguable that the Democrats began the process. It all started with their hounding of Trump in the courts, at least some of which was politically motivated, and continued in the final days of Biden’s presidency with his preemptive pardons of family members and political figures (they’re all here, including the one for his son Hunter), and a wild attempt to declare a constitutional amendment ratified (the Equal Rights Amendment) that hadn’t been.
“I believe in the rule of law, and I am optimistic that the strength of our legal institutions will ultimately prevail over politics,” Biden said in a statement justifying his actions. “But . . . ” You can stop reading right there. Because if you believe in the rule of law, “but,” then you don’t believe in the rule of law at all. It’s the same as those people who say they believe in free speech, but . . .
To be clear, I begin to fear we may be living through the death of the republic—the transition to empire that historical experience has led us to expect—but it’s not all Trump. It’s a truly bipartisan effort.
I am just fine with a vibe shift that gets us away from ESG, DEI, and the strangling regulation and ideologically motivated incompetence that lies behind the Los Angeles inferno, not to mention Chicago’s less spectacular descent into insolvency and criminality. If Davos Man needed Trump’s reelection to point out that if Europe went woke, it would go broke, then fine.
But trashing the rule of law is another matter.
And note how perfectly the phenomena coincide: the erosion of the laws and the imperial aspirations—Greenland; the Panama Canal; Canada(just kidding); the “Gulf of America;” and Mount McKinley, named for the president who, in addition to being the original Tariff Man, acquired Guam, the Philippines, and Puerto Rico, not forgetting Hawaii.
Twenty-one years ago, I published Colossus, which warned that the American empire was unlikely ever to succeed as long as the United States imports rather than exports people, borrows from abroad rather than invests at home, and loses interest in most of its military undertakings in five years on average. America’s manpower and fiscal and attention deficits have not got smaller since I wrote that book.
Davos Man wants the Trumpian vibe shift to come to Europe. And I get why. God knows, Europe needs fresh leadership, but not as much a Trump of their own as two dozen Javier Mileis.
As always, Davos Man should be very careful what he wishes for. Five years ago, the World Economic Forum crowd said they wanted net-zero emissions and a few months later, they got just that when Covid-19 shut the EU economy down. This year, ESG is out and MEGA is in. Well, let’s see how the trade plays out in 12 months’ time. You’ll know where to find me: trudging up and down the Promenade, in search of the Davos consensus, so I can take the other side.
Applied I F Limited, Non-Political Investigation into Voting Integrity at U.K. General Election held on 7 May 2015 and Since, the Electoral Commission Corrupted Its Own Voting Count Model which has 3 Primary Voting Categories Missing, which is NOT Compliant with Electoral Laws, nor indeed, is it Compliant with the Electoral Commission Own Voting " Count Model for Counting Officers " which the Electoral Commission produced in 2010 to Regulate Elections and used up until November / December 2014 , the Electoral Commission by Corrupting Its Own Voting Count Model has caused a Constitutional Crisis, making the House of Commons an Unelected House, which has been happening across many countries in the Western part of the World. The fact therefore remains, any Laws enacted are "Null and Void" "Ultra Vires" Stealing Your Vote = Stealing Your Fundamental Freedoms = Enslavement. The Seventeenth Century Doctrine " Fundamental Law " Bill of Rights 1688/89 cannot be tampered with , while Sovereignty remains the Central Function. The U.S. enshrined the Doctrine Bill of Rights into there Constitution in 1776. The Bill of Rights includes Freedoms, Free and Fair Elections and forbids invasion of the shores. The Magna Carta 1215 is also a Doctrine. The Secret Ballot Act 1872 was enacted to allow the electorate to Vote on a Ballot Paper, instead of a show of hands, which meant they could not lose their job or home, because of who they voted for. The Representation of the People Act was enacted which also includes postal voting, The E.U. has elected MEP's , but they do not run the E.U. the EU top positions who want to rule the world, is run by the WEF, IMF , WHO , NATO and the list goes on, who are not elected by the people? While the One World Government has a Depopulation Agenda, Climate Change Agenda and many laws, rules and regulations which are thousands of pages, which is a nonsense in itself, as it restricts the Freedoms of the People. One has to question whether the One World Government is abiding by the Magna Carta 1215, the Bill of Rights 1688/89, the Representation of the People Act 1983, the Nuremberg Code 1947, the Geneva Protocol, the Prorogation Act which is also part of the Fixed Term Parliament Act 2011? One also has to question a One World Government which has a Depopulation Agenda, how many people have had adverse reactions, how many people have died and are dying, does any of their actions, bare any resemblance to what happened in WWII ? ARCHBOLD 2013
SWEET & MAXWELL
II NATURE OF INDICTABLE OFFENCES
A. WHEN AN INDICTMENT LIES
(1) GENERAL
1-2 An indictment is the ordinary common law remedy for all treasons,
misprisions of treasons and offences of a public nature:
2 Hawk. c. 25, ss.1, 4. It is also the means by which certain
offences created by or under statute are brought before the Crown
Court for trial
(2) Breach of common law duty
1-3 An indictment lies at common law for a breach of duty which is not
a mere private injury but an outrage on the moral duties of society,
e.g. neglect to provide sufficient food, medical aid or other
necessaries, for a person unable to provide for himself, and for
whom the defendant is obliged by duty or contract to provide, where
such neglect injures the health of that person, whether the person
injured is of extreme age (R. v. Instan [1893] 1 Q.B. 450), or of
tender years (R. v. Senior [1899] 1 Q.B. 283 at 289), or is the
defendant or servant (R. v. Smith (1865) L. & C. 607), or an
apprentice (R. v. Smith (1837) 8 C. & P. 153), or is a person of
unsound mind (R. v. Pelham [1846] 8 Q.B. 959). See also post, 19-22
et seq. (manslaughter). The common law is strengthened by statutory
provisions, e.g. Offences against the Person Act 1861, s.26 (servants
and apprentices); CYPA 1933, s.1 (persons under 16); MHA 1983, s.127
(persons of unsound mind).It being a democratic principle, however,
that it is for Parliament and not the executive or judges to
determine whether conduct not previously regarded as criminal should
be treated as such, statute is now to be regarded as the sole source
of new offences: R. v. Jones; Ayliffe v. DPP; Swain v. Same [2007]
1 A.C. 136, HL; and R. (Gentle) v. Prime Minister [2008] 1 A.C. 1356,
HL (at [40]) (and see post, 1-5).
Unless a statute specifically so provides, or the case is one
in which the common law, in the criminal context, imposes a duty or
responsibility on one person to act in a particular way towards
another, then a mere omission to act cannot make the person, who so
fails to do something, guilty of a criminal offence: see R. v. Miller
[1983] 2 A.C. 161, HL, where the appellant was held liable for his
reckless omission to take steps to nullify a risk of damage to
property which had been created by his own earlier inadvertent act
(see furth post, 23-10, 23-31). The House of Lords approached the
facts on the basis that-unlike the case of the mere bystander-the
appellant had a duty to act.
(3) Acts prejudicing the public
1-4 An indictment lies at common law for any act of wilful negligence
which endangers human life or health: Williams v. East India Co.
(1802) 3 East 192; Shillito v. Thompson (1875) 1 Q.B.D. 12; or
against an innkeeper for failing to provide traveller with food and
lodging without reasonable excuse, on being tendered a reasonable
price; the question of what amounts to a reasonable excuse being a
question of fact for the jury: R. v. Higgins (1948) 1 K.B. 165 32
Cr.App.R. 113, CCA.
An indictment also lies for all nuisances of a public
nature, though occasioned by an act in itself innocent, if the
creation of the nuisance is the probable consequence of the act:
R. v. Moore (1832) 3 B. & Ad. 184; and see 1 Hawk. c. 75 ss.6, 7.
As to the offence of public nuisance generally, see paos, 31-40 et
seq.
How to Check Disclosure of Vote Rigging on an Industrial Scale. www.Sleazeexpo.wordpress.com