Aurelia Butler

People who go to Davos — people like me — are often derided as smug and arrogant. There is no denying that there is an air of self-satisfaction at many mountaintop parties. What a thrill, to find yourself rubbing shoulders with billionaires and potentates. Even better if you are on a panel, exchanging earnest ideas on how to “save the world”.But this year, I could not help thinking about the ghosts at the cocktail reception. Those people who I had once met at Davos — but who are now dead, disappeared or in disgrace.Top of the disgraced list is Vladimir Putin, who I met in a relatively dingy Davos hotel in 2009. At that point, Putin was still an honoured participant, happy (ish) to chat with a small group of western journalists — and the leader of a large and boisterous Russian delegation. Davos used to be a big thing for the Russians. They held court, did deals and partied hard. Oleg Deripaska, the aluminium oligarch, held the most ostentatious party every year. At a dinner in 2019, I found myself sitting next to Alexei Mordashov, the billionaire boss of the steel company Severstal. We had a slightly surreal conversation about whether the Russian state had indeed sent assassins to Britain to try to kill the former agent Sergei Skripal. Mordashov claimed that he was reluctantly coming to the conclusion that the orders had probably come from the Russian state. This year, I bumped into someone else who had been at that dinner and wondered aloud, when I would next see Mordashov? “Probably never,” was the response. Sounds about right. Back in 2008, the year before I met Putin, I interviewed Pervez Musharraf, then president of Pakistan, in Davos. “There is no danger in Pakistan,” he assured us. “Business is bustling.” A few months later he had been forced from office and gone into exile. This was a relatively dignified exit compared to the fate of Viktor Yanukovych, then prime minister of Ukraine, who I found myself sitting next to at a Davos wine tasting in 2007. Since we did not have a common language, we sipped our Château Lafite in silence. While I am still going to Davos, I have largely cut out the wine tastings. But where is Yanukovich these days? He fled Ukraine in 2014, after the Orange revolution — and is thought to be lurking somewhere in Russia.And then there are the minor operatives. When Donald Trump spoke at Davos in 2018, the White House official briefing the press was Rob Porter. A month later, he was forced to resign after allegations of wife-beating.What of the business heroes of Davos, also prone to sudden falls from grace? Last year Sam Bankman-Fried’s cryptocurrency exchange, FTX, was listed as an official partner of the forum. Now FTX has collapsed and Bankman-Fried has swapped his Davos badge for handcuffs. This is an old story. In 2001, the forum held a session on the “shape of the 21st century corporation” — addressed by Kenneth Lay, the CEO of Enron. A few months later, Enron had notched up one of the biggest corporate bankruptcies in history. Lay was eventually arrested in 2004.It is not just the Americans who have fallen. In 2018, Carlos Ghosn of Nissan was on the main stage at Davos, participating in a session entitled, “Towards a Better Capitalism”. That November, he was arrested in Japan. That same year, I met Jack Ma — China’s most celebrated entrepreneur — in Davos. He told the forum: “Love is important in business.” But the Chinese government evidently decided loyalty and discretion were even more so. After antagonising the party, Ma stepped back from business and fled the public eye. By Chinese standards this is a pretty gentle defenestration. I often think of Rui Chenggang, a handsome Chinese TV anchor and reputed nationalist. I got chatting to him in 2014, after he attended my interview at Davos with the then Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe (himself assassinated last year). Rui told me to look him up when I was in Beijing. I never got the chance because he was arrested that year on corruption charges. He is believed to have been sentenced in secret to a long jail term.Western journalists have also come a cropper. Recently, the #MeToo movement has demoted household names — like the US TV host Charlie Rose, who interviewed Jack Ma at the forum in 2015 — from Davos to the doghouse.What accounts for this run of ill-fortune? Is it me? Is it Davos? My tentative conclusion is that you meet people at the WEF when they are riding high. To get there in the first place, you may have taken big risks and seen them come off. That can make you feel infallible. But my advice to fellow Davos-goers: if you ever start to feel invincible, just take a look at the list of past participants. And [email protected] More

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The White House is refusing to negotiate with hardline Republicans on raising the debt ceiling because it believes enough of them will eventually back off their demands, as a growing chorus of investors, business groups and moderate conservatives warn of the dangers of edging towards a default. The high-stakes deadlock is widely expected to last for months, and could come down to the last minute as each side tests the other ahead of June when the U.S. government might be forced to default on paying its debt. As the White House calls for House of Representatives Republicans to lift the debt ceiling to avoid economic chaos, it plans to highlight their threats to spending programs and the global economy, aides and allies of President Joe Biden say. “Leading congressional Republicans have themselves admitted in the past that default would trigger an economic collapse, killing millions of jobs and decimating 401k plans,” White House spokesperson Andrew Bates told Reuters. “But hardline MAGA Republicans are now advocating for this outcome.”The U.S. government hit its $31.4 trillion borrowing limit on Thursday, a figure that reflects money already spent by the government. House Republicans want cuts to government programsbefore they will approve a higher ceiling; a similar demand sparked a 2011 credit rating downgrade and chaos in financial markets. But the White House’s strategy has its risks, given the unpredictable nature of the hardline Republicans in the House, some Democrats say. “Certainly there are segments of the House Republican caucus, and in the broader sort of conservative atmosphere, that are fairly explicitly making the case that it wouldn’t be the worst thing” to not come to a deal with Democrats, said Tobin Marcus, who served as an economic adviser to then Vice President Biden during a 2011 debt ceiling fight.Republicans call the idea of a default alarmist. “We’re not going to default on the debt. We have the ability to manage servicing and paying our interest. But we similarly should not blindly increase the debt ceiling,” Representative Chip Roy, a leading conservative, told Reuters.2024 CAMPAIGN FOCUS ON EXTREMISM The game of chicken comes as the White House prepares Biden’s expected re-election campaign. Biden, 80, is expected to announce in February that he plans to run for a second term, and aides plan to focus on the rock-solid labor market, falling costs and threats from “extreme” Republicans.The debt ceiling fight could help Biden here, some strategists say. Some aides think he has plenty to gain from being seen as “the adult in the room” facing an opposition willing to tank the economy. Democrats are planning to deploy that theme in the 2024 election even if an agreement is reached quickly on the debt ceiling. The White House is also flagging Republicans’ vague plans to prioritize some federal spending over others as the debt limit nears, and suggestions from others that spending on Social Security be targeted.Biden on Monday dismissed some lawmakers as “fiscally demented.”Meanwhile, the economic picture remains mixed. Biden and top U.S. officials have repeatedly said they believe the economy’s growth can slow to more sustainable levels, without putting people out of work. The so-called “soft landing” is what the Federal Reserve is aiming for as well, though they have conceded that goal may be elusive.Retail sales fell the most in a year in December, suggesting growth is ebbing in the consumption-driven U.S. economy. Factory output, a barometer on the president’s goal to revive U.S. manufacturing, also recorded its biggest drop in nearly two years last month.Biden didn’t mention these figures when they were released, but praised a different economic report also released on Wednesday on producer prices that showed progress in taming inflation, the administration’s top economic concern. “We’ve got the most vibrant economy in the world right now – in the world,” Biden said in a political speech on Monday. “We’re doing better than any other major nation in the world today.”Trillions in spending authorized in the first two years of Biden’s presidency is expected to be distributed over the coming years, which the White House says will help U.S. growth and stave off recession. A failure to raise the debt ceiling could have the opposite effect.”From both an economic and a financial perspective, a failure to raise the debt ceiling would be an unmitigated disaster,” said David Kelly, chief global strategist for JPMorgan Chase & Co (NYSE:JPM) funds.”While a failure to increase the debt ceiling is the most immediate fiscal threat to the economy and markets in 2023, damage could also be done either by continuing to neglect deficits altogether or by inflicting very sharp fiscal tightening on an economy which is now thoroughly hooked on the drugs of monetary and fiscal stimulus.”(This story has been refiled to remove extra word ‘said’ in paragraph 4) More

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy said on Friday he would accept an invitation from President Joe Biden to sit down and discuss how to raise the U.S. debt limit.McCarthy, the top Republican in Congress, made the remark on Twitter in response to a comment from Biden that he was going to have a discussion with McCarthy on raising the ceiling. More

In a filing in Manhattan federal court, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) said Shkreli has not complied with its requests for information relating to Druglike Inc, a company it said he formed last July, and noted his apparent failure to pay any of a $64.6 million penalty that accompanied the ban.An attorney for Shkreli said she hoped to resolve the issue quickly. “We think that this is a misunderstanding with the FTC,” said Brianne Murphy, who added that Druglike was a software company rather than a drug company.    Shkreli became a lightning rod for criticism after raising the price of the anti-parasitic drug Daraprim to $750 per tablet from about $17.50 in 2015 as chief executive of Turing Pharmaceuticals, and appearing unapologetic when criticized.    He was sentenced to seven years in prison after being convicted in August 2017 of defrauding investors in two hedge funds he ran, and scheming to defraud investors in drugmaker Retrophin (NASDAQ:TVTX) Inc, where he had been chief executive prior to Turing.    Shkreli was released early from prison last May.    U.S. District Judge Denise Cote imposed the lifetime drug industry ban and $64.6 million penalty last February, related to Shkreli’s efforts to keep generic Daraprim rivals off the market. Cote will decide the FTC’s contempt motion. More