Big World Matters (Davos, Fed & Such)...

What a day this is if you pay attention to business news.  Media love a crisis, telling the story, explaining the news, hooking readers with controversy, using a good-guy, bad-guy narrative. The "fluid" and oblique Fed issues a statement as to what some are calling a "Zero Interest Rate Era".  Obama meets with CEOs, the House prepares to pass the economic stimulus bill and Davos kicks off today with the theme Shaping the Post-Crisis World (post-crisis???? did some assume the global financial crisis would be over?).

The media is yet to call this a Depression, just as powers that be and the media were reluctant to call this a Recession as it became named the Global Financial/Economic Crisis.  Reading Vanity Fair Editor Graydon Carter's letter, The Year of Investing Dangerously, he dances around the names for this further-sinking time with these terms: the Second Great Depression; the Great Retrenchment; the Great Reckoning. Paul Krugman forst came out with the D-word: Depression 2.0. 

Several media outlets are covering Davos. Here are the ones I'm following: Financial Times Davos 2009; Dispatches from Davos, a Forbes blog; Time's Davos 2009 Blog; and Tracking Davos - a HuffPo Big News page.  Arianna Huffington is participating in several panels at Davos involving new media, politics and bottom-up technology and media fusion potential.

Interesting reads on Private Equity: The Ultimate Bubble? by Michael Wolff in Vanity Fair (a "shadow banking system" in a fluid situation and God himself couldn't turn a profit at most companies now") and a Bloomberg exclusive on the gravest crisis in the 40-year history of leveraged buy-outs.

The World Economic Forum is buzzing.  The crisis is building.

(update I: Wonder how we got here?  A good explanation for this perfect storm came out today.) update II: Still, the media is covering Davos for a multitude of reasons (and I wanted to add the link to the story in the photo), several outlined by the Time blog article on Davos, including that "for the global tv networks, it is the equivalent of College Football Gameday on ESPN -- Davos offers a backdrop that adds variety and excitement to the proceedings. Plus, the presence of lots of prominent talking heads in one place turns the perpetual challenge of booking enough guests to fill all that airtime into an exercise in shooting fish in a barrel."

update III: I'm also following Twitter Davos

Comments

[Kay Dennison]

The American public may not, on the whole, be too bright (after all, we did elect Bush twice), but I hope to God they don't think we don't see that we're going down the tubes. AND the "let 'em eat cake" attitude of the bailout recepients is going to cause more incidents like the man who killed his wife and five children and then himself because he lost his job. The last 8 years have been hell for the working poor and middle class. So they can talk all they want, it won't do me a damned bit of good.