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No Dick

Mark Landler of the New York "Times" reports about the opening day of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland with a few curious insights.

The obvious one is that no member of the Bush Administration is in attendance (at least so far). Plenty of Americans in both business are government are there, just no one in the Executive Branch. To be honest, the WEF has been described as a "love-in". You have major economic and political personalities gushing in a mutual admiration society. Protestors always attempt to make a name for themselves but the Swiss police keep them at bay, far from the action. So as cold as Davos is in January, it's still an excuse to fly Swissair to Zurich and flex the expense account.

Newly minted Secretary of State Condolezza Rice obviously was preoccupied, but not sending even John Snow at Treasury indicates Bush has decided not to use the WEF as a platform to say anything. Perhaps he was not expecting the deficit projections to be so ... big.

Meanwhile, the ever pessimistic Stephen Roach of Morgan Stanley blamed the Federal Reserve for not raising interest rates to put the brakes on all this debt. It's kind of funny....Morgan Stanley poured in over half a million dollars to Bush-Cheney '04 on the premise (you would think) that a privatization scheme in Social Security would be in the offing. Now Roach wants us to believe that Bush is so incompetent he cannot even lobby the Federal Reserve for an interest rate hike? Either the White House is "on script" or it's not and in any event Roach obviously can call in and ask.

In any case, it is probably true that this is the year where interest rates in the US will rise precipitously. Perhaps that speech was not going to go over too well in the rosy glow of the weak winter sun. The party will go on at Davos, make no mistake, just with no Dick.

posted by Thomas at 10:01 PM 0 comments