The Davos countdown has begun, as some of the world’s most powerful embark on the ritual trek up the Magic Mountain. What should be expected from this glitzy dialogue in this Year of Unreasonableness. Davos this year is titled The Great Transformation. But can Davos offer real alternatives or will it serve up a smiling, gritted-teeth espousal that ‘business as usual’ can and should be sustained…read my response to Mr Wolf’s proposed ‘seven ways to fix the system’ on OpenDemocracy @ http://bit.ly/wP96tP…
Optimism in the face of repetitive failure is a sure sign of madness, I wrote in the article, Time for Progressive Companies to Deal with the Climate Bad Guys, published two weeks ago in The Guardian. Progressive CEOs need to apply their corporate muscle effectively, and that means challenging those businesses preventing a timely transition to the sustainable economy.
Heated responses to my argument were, shall we say, ‘racy’, in fact in the main dismissive and ridiculing.…
The Financial Transactions Tax is surely dead, may it rest more peacefully in future. Surging objections to the European proposal, indeed ridicule, have come from almost every quarter, from leading lights representing the ‘responsible investment movement’ to the IMF’s former chief economist, Kenneth Rogoff. Beleaguered European Commission President, José Manuel Barroso, will find it hard to continue circulating in polite society if he sees through his high-profile support of the tax to the bitter end.…
European Commission President, José Manuel Barroso, in supporting the financial transactions tax, has allied himself with OccupyWallStreet. But OccupyWallStreet has more than a moral alignment to offer Europe’s leading bureaucrat, it also has some smart policy proposals.
“It’s a question of fairness,” Barroso argues, “It is time for the financial sector to make a contribution back to society”, pointing out that tax payers have contributed more than €4,000bn in guarantees to the banking sector to support it through the crisis.…
China’s criticism that the US is failing to live within its means is a little rich given that it has benefited so much by the US’s debt addicted, three decade long consumer binge. But that aside, China does have a point. And so does Standard and Poor in its historic downgrading of the US’s credit worthiness, despite the dispute over an alleged US$2 trillion maths error deemed by S&P as ‘neither here nor there’.…
How much is WEF worth…well, obviously a lot given who it can draw to the table and what folks pay to get in the door and how the media covers Davos in particular…but how much?
Of course one answer is that it is a public interest organisation and cannot be thought about in that way. Trust in commercial organisations is after all painfully low, as the Edelman Trust Barometer for this year highlights.…
Njongonkulu Ndungane, then Archbishop of Cape Town (following on from Desmond Tutu) turned up on my doorstep in London shortly after the G8 Gleneagles Summit at which US$50 billion in additional commitments of international development assistance were made. His question, put simply, was how best to track the delivery of real money against these commitments. My answer, crudely, was that he was watching the wrong ball, and that the real menace was the arrival in Africa of ‘private finance initiatives’.…
Climate finance, now the focus of much of the international climate negotiations, are those funds designed to address the climate challenge and its implications. Framed by the principle of common and differentiated responsibilities, climate finance has become synonymous with the accountability of richer nations to support the mitigation and adaptation efforts of poorer nations. This crucial principle has informed the work of the UN High-Level Advisory Group on Climate Finance, discussed elsewhere in the paper, and underpins its conclusions and insights.…
