Chartbook 431 Convening, staging, acting ... and was it never about Greenland and mainly about the Fed? Which Davos-theory won?

To matter or not to matter?

I started the week of the World Economic Forum 2026 with two contending theories of Davos.

One interpretation held that the gathering was largely irrelevant.

The other suggested that it might potentially be a significant forum for coordinating global capital in the face of the MAGA rampage.

Now that the event is over, what do we conclude?

My impression is that neither of the original interpretations captures the spectacle we just witnessed.

Far too much happened for one simply to dismiss WEF as an irrelevance.

On the other hand, it was not capital that pushed back this week, but politicians and “officials” - both from the US and Europe.

The weight of Larry Fink and BlackRock added to the attraction of the WEF itself. It secured a truly remarkable turnout of capital of all kinds - asset managers, banks, hedge funds, PE, tech, industry from all over the world. Even Elon Musk showed up on the last afternoon.

What was no less striking, however, was the collective public silence of this array in the face of the performance of the MAGA delegation. Panels that could have been turned political, were pivoted towards tech, AI etc.

Whatever went on behind closed doors, in public no one distanced themselves from the bullying of the American government. This is not, perhaps, surprising given the similar lack of corporate pushback even at home against the outrageous activities of the Trump administration.

The most plausible interpretation is not that this silence implies tacit approval, but rather fear of retaliation and victimization by the administration.

This is a peculiar and distasteful feature of the current moment. But it is not just a matter of intimidation. It is also a question of legitimacy. What topics does business speak on? And on what not? And in what forum?

These questions are acute in the MAGA moment. But they are, in fact, structural problem of all forums convened by business interests. Ultimately, though business may have might and wealth and technological expertise, an effort by business, as business, to convene a public forum is always going to be shot through with severe conflicts of interest. “Total corporatism” rarely works, as Charles Maier demonstrated in his classic Recasting Bourgeois Europe with regard to the 1920s. Which is why conventional media businesses tend to operate at arms length. In Davos, especially when it is BlackRock doing the convening, that mediation collapses.

When it is too obvious who is speaking and there are “too many” motives, and those may have consequences and trigger blowback the result may be public silence.

And yet nevertheless, WEF convened and one can hardly deny that it was a significant moment.

So how best to understand this?

Perhaps we might distinguish between three different performances: convening, staging and acting.

Convening: The semi-public assembling of a considerable weight of money and power demands attention and can, in the right circumstances, build a momentum of its own. “You have to be there, because others are there”. “You have to be there this year because you were there last year and you expect to be there next year.” Larry Fink and BlackRock’s commitment built that momentum this year.

Staging: The Forum could be entirely private. It could be open to the general public. Instead, it creates a peculiar type of stage that is both confined to the exclusive group of conference attendees and yet broadcast to the wider world. The program itself creates an “occasion”, which, in the fiercely competitive economy of attention, is a precious commodity. Key players in staging this “event” are not so much the corporate sponsors, as the WEF itself, the global media and the speakers who show up to perform.

Acting: With capital convened and the stage set, it is up to a third group - mainly politicians - to act, which in this case means to deliver a series of messages both in front of the cameras and behind the scenes. Some of these interventions are meaningful in their own right. But a gathering like WEF is also significant in placing them alongside each other. It is hard to think of another occasion at which performances by global political leaders are so directly compared as at WEF. Contrast von der Leyen, Macron and Merz to Carney. Or, ask yourself, where were the Brits?

On this occasion, it was in these performances that the counter to MAGA was articulated. The Europeans took turns to find ways of making the Greenland point. Behind the scenes there was more pushback and negotiation.

Of course, this kind of wrestling over the international agenda, can also happen in other venues: G7, G20 etc. But those aren’t convened by an immense gathering of global capital, whose weight, even if it remains silent, can be felt. Nor do they offer the kind of theater that Davos provides.

It is through this triadic structure that WEF achieves real effects.

Of course you might argue that Trump’s pullback - TACO - was inevitable anyway. Who knows. It can’t be ruled out.

Or, were worries about the market reaction, in fact the most important force in driving MAGA’s retreat over Greenland? This seems possible.

Indeed this points to a significant distinction. The pressure of capital can be exercised through the individual leverage of large businesses. Or through the combination of convening-staging-acting. But, any such mobilization is also subject to counter pressure with individual players being picked off and victimized. “The markets” are anonymous. You can’t retaliate against them in the same direct and crude way.

Clearly, the anonymous force of the markets is distinct and powerful. But are they independent of the WEF-show and visa versa? Surely not.

The reason why the markets reacted in the way that they did was not after all that Greenland matters in its own right, but because it was the cause of a “fuss”, a “fuss’ that highlighted the capricious and irresponsible nature of MAGA policy. And the impact of the market reaction on the administration was then amplified by the stage of WEF and the awkward questions that could be posed there, both in public and behind closed doors - the “speech acts”.

Thus, the individual business players, the big mobilizations of capital, the staging, the political actors, the media and the markets are all interacting to create an “effect”.

And then I opened the paper on the flight home yesterday and I began to wonder, whether we were barking up the wrong tree. Was the preoccupation with the risk of military intervention in Greenland basically eurocentric. And was the whole thing really about the Fed?

Treasury department officials have recently sounded out big bond investors about Rieder, and former Fed governor Kevin Warsh, seen as another strong contender for the job, said several people with knowledge of the matter. Treasury maintains regular contact with market participants, but the questions about Rieder have become more pointed recently, some of the people added. The Treasury did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Rieder, who as chief investment officer for global fixed income oversees BlackRock’s $2.4tn bond strategies, is a well-known markets veteran. He has been at the asset manager since BlackRock acquired his firm R3 Capital Partners in 2009. Before that he spent two decades at Lehman Brothers. White House economic adviser Kevin Hassett was long seen as the clear favourite to win Trump’s endorsement. But his odds have tumbled in recent weeks, after the FT reported big bond investors told the Treasury department that choosing a staunch ally of the president could unnerve markets and inflame worries over central bank independence. Bets on Hassett cooled further after it emerged earlier this month that the Department of Justice had opened a criminal probe into Powell’s testimony. The investigation triggered a backlash from former Fed chiefs, international central bankers and senior figures on Wall Street, including JPMorgan chief executive Jamie Dimon. The Fed has defended Powell’s testimony.

Am I saying that the Fed chairmanship was stitched up in the rooms of the Congress hall in Davos? No. But, is it plausible that by convening the crowd and offering up the stage at the WEF for Trump to do his thing, Larry Fink raised BlackRock’s visibility on Trump’s radar? Surely he did. Larry runs a pretty impressive “club”! He has quite the board. And Trump loves himself a board. Fink convened the show and offered Trump the chance of the kind of applause that he loves.

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