Thursday, January 28, 2010

Money and influence

How Davos makes incredibly rich people seem smarter than they actually are. - Slate Magazine

Daniel Gross notes:
It struck me that the difference between banality and profundity is generally a few billion dollars: The real alchemy of finance is to endow those skilled at finance to wield authority in adjacent or even unrelated areas. That's the general theory of Davos, bankers sharing their theories about nonbanking subjects. Stick around and you'll hear a lot of conventional wisdom on globalization, climate change, poverty reduction, financial crisis, but it somehow sounds deeper and more weighty because it's delivered by an extraordinarily wealthy CEO, a private equity executive, or hedge fund manager rather than by a journalist.

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