Version 4: Sat, Jul 6, 2024
Davos Man: How the Billionaires Devoured the World by Peter S. Goodman (Custom House 2022)
Mixed-bag mini review. Easy reading with by and large interesting information on some of the movers and shakers of the fianancial world, with a few caveats.
Here are a few segments that I found useful:
Stephen A. Schwarzman
Page 158:
Near the end of his senior year at Yale, he exploited his inclusion in the secret society Skull & Bones to seek counsel from another member, W. Averell Harriman, the diplomat who had done a turn as governor of New York. Harriman invited him for lunch at his home on the Upper East Side of Manhattan
When Schwarzman confided that he entertained thoughts of a political career, Harriman, then nearing eighty, posed a question: “Young man, are you independently wealthy?
“No,” Schwarzman replied.
“Well,” Harriman told him, “that will make a great difference in your life. I advise you, if you have any interest in politics whatsoever, to go out and make as much money as you can. That will give you independence if you ever decide you want to go into politics. If my father wasn’t E. H. Harriman of the Union Pacific Railroad, you wouldn’t be sitting here talking to me today.
Larry Fink
Page 138:
Fink built his reputation as a master of the intricacies of complex corporate restructurings. At the age of only thirty-one, he had reached the status of managing director, the youngest in First Boston’s history. But in 1986, he committed a grievous error that cost the firm $100 million, a bad bet on a rise in interest rates. That mistake—which Fink blamed on the analytical systems he had relied on—destroyed his career at the bank. It also marked the beginning of his obsessive interest in harnessing the computing power used to process data.
Two years after that episode, Fink left the bank and joined Steve Schwarzman’s firm, Blackstone, running a bond-trading venture under a boutique arrangement they called BlackRock.
It was extraordinarily profitable, but Fink and Schwarzman possessed too much ego and bravado to peacefully coexist. They clashed over how to distribute the winnings, prompting Schwarzman to sell the unit to a bank in Pittsburgh for a mere $240 million, a rare atrocious transaction for one of Wall Street’s master dealmakers.
George Osborne
Pages 93-4:
George Osborne was not inclined toward seeking popular affirmation. In bearing and elocution, he presented like someone accustomed to deference by dint of his standing as a member of the English aristocracy.
He was the eldest son of the seventeenth baronet of Ballintaylor, a hereditary title that traced its lineage back to 1629. He attended St. Paul’s, an elite boarding school whose London campus occupied a stretch of the River Thames that included a boathouse and seven cricket pitches. Then he enrolled at Oxford University, the ivy-draped nesting ground for the ruling class.
Over the course of a meteoric political career, Osborne had gained a reputation as a shrewd tactician, as well as someone not reluctant to share his cleverness with the rest of humanity. In 2010, when he was only thirtyeight, Osborne had assumed control of the national treasury, becoming Britain’s youngest ever chancellor of the exchequer in a government headed by his fellow Oxford alumnus—and drinking society member—David Cameron. He had used that perch to assault the nation’s vaunted social safety net, imposing cuts to a vast array of government programs in the name of fiscal rectitude.
and on pages 279-80
Companies that had managed to avoid paying taxes to the British treasury when times were bountiful now used the crisis as an opportunity for corporate panhandling. The Agnelli family—the clan that controlled Fiat—owned a conglomerate called CNH Industrial. It had managed to secure British tax refunds exceeding £15 million between 2017 and 2019—a period in which it had relied on the hired advice of one George Osborne, the former British treasury secretary. In the midst of the pandemic, the Agnelli-owned conglomerate helped itself to £600 million in credit from the Bank of England.
Klaus Schwab
My knowledge of the people mentioned is limited and trust Goodman on the facts. However I have done a bit of reading on certain areas and that eventually made me doubt the book. For example here is what Goodman says on Klaus Schwab in a crucial passage on the establishment of the World Economic Forum, page 37:
Born in 1938, Schwab had come of age in Europe’s postwar reconstruction. He was steeped in the principles of social democracy, endorsing the notion that government should play a central role in the marketplace, protecting workers against joblessness while providing universal health care and pensions. He was an unwavering devotee to the project of European integration and the dream of a continent mobilized through collective action. During a graduate sojourn at Harvard in the late 1960s, Schwab became enamored of the corporate management theories in vogue in the United States. He sketched out stakeholder theory as the means to express what he came to portray as the optimal arrangement—business and government working cooperatively to promote higher living standards.
This was the spirit that animated what Schwab first called the European Management Forum, a gathering of academics, business executives, and government officials that he organized in 1971, when he was only thirtythree.
Now, here is what Wikipedia says on Schwab:
While attending Harvard, Schwab found a mentor in future National Security Advisor and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.
My point in mentioning Wikipedia is along the lines of “hey, even Wikipedia has this!”. That looks intriguing and deserves further investigation, but not in this book. Here is more information:
Dr Klaus Schwab; or How the CFR Taught Me to Stop Worrying & Love The Bomb by Johnny Vedmore - Newspaste
The World Economic Forum wasn’t simply the brainchild of Klaus Schwab, but was actually born out of a CIA-funded Harvard program headed by Henry Kissinger and pushed to fruition by John Kenneth Galbraith and the “real” Dr. Strangelove, Herman Kahn. This is the amazing story behind the real men who recruited Klaus Schwab, who helped him create the World Economic Forum, and who taught him to stop worrying and love the bomb.
Bill Gates
But there is more. Bill Gates a well known billionaire and frequent WEF attendee is mentioned only twice, pages 23 and 384:
So he was here—paying fees reaching several hundred thousands of dollars a year for a Forum membership, plus another $27,000 per head to attend the meeting—posing for photos with Bono, congratulating Bill Gates on his philanthropic exploits, tweeting out inspirational quotes from Deepak Chopra, and still finding time to buttonhole that sovereign wealth chieftain from Abu Dhabi in pursuit of investment for his luxury-goods mall in Singapore.
Politicians like Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders were proposing wealth taxes as a means of securing revenue to finance ideas like universal health care and subsidized childcare. A 6 percent wealth tax applied to fortunes larger than $1 billion would have netted $63 billion from the twenty richest people—more than seven times2 their reported philanthropic contributions. Not even the most generous, Warren Buffett and Bill Gates, approached the 6 percent mark. Dell had given less than the average—$158 million, or 0.6 percent of his $27.6 billion fortune.
No mention of Bill Gates’ involvement with the WEF even though health issues are frequently part of the agenda and he is the supporter of a number of questionable projects with vaccinations around the world including essentially bankrolling the WHO.
Bill Gates - Agenda Contributor Archive
Microsoft Legal Problems
U.S. v. Microsoft Corp., 253 F.3d 34 (D.C. Cir. 2001)
Also of interest: LLM: Microsoft Legal Problems
Land Owner
In addition he is land owner of some standing as the following links show:
Who is America’s largest landowner? The Land Report 100 Research Team works all year long to answer that question By Eric O’Keefe - Successful Farming - February 2, 2024 Archive
Bill Gates - Land Report
With almost 250,000 acres of highly productive farm ground spread out over 17 states, the co-founder of MICROSOFT ranks as the nation’s largest private farmland owner.
Bill Gates has over 111,000 hectares of farmland in US By Minh Hieu - January 13, 2024 Archive
With 111,288 hectares of farmland spread across 17 states, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates is the biggest private farmland owner in the U.S., according to the Land Report.
The billionaire is also the 42nd-largest overall landowner in the country with most of those ranked above him owning mostly timberland, according to the Land Report 100, which lists the top 100 American landowners.
Recently published book on Bill Gates:
The Bill Gates Problem by Tim Schwab, Penguin, 2024
Jeremy Corbyn
Goodman on Jeremy Corbyn on page 118:
But Johnson possessed the advantage of being unburdened by any definable set of beliefs. He appeared beholden only to his desire to continue in residence at 10 Downing Street. And he was bestowed a magnificent political gift: his opposition party interlocutor, Jeremy Corbyn, was as beloved as wet socks.
Stylistically and politically stuck in another era, Corbyn had served as a member of Parliament since 1983. He had long nursed antipathy to the E.U. from the left. This undermined his party’s potential appeal as a gathering place for the growing number of citizens who were appalled by Brexit. Even as a majority of voters shifted to thinking that Brexit was a mistake, Johnson capitalized on Labour’s weakness to wrest an overwhelming majority in national elections in December 2019.
Two books that paint a completely different picture:
Weaponising Anti-Semitism by Asa Winstanley, OR Books, La Vergne, 2023
Ten Years Hard Labour by Chris Williamson (Lola Books 2022)
Never mind Goodman’s views on Corbyn, UK voters had a different take:
Jeremy Corbyn wins Islington seat as independent MP after being expelled from Labour: Jeremy Corbyn won the seat as an independent with 24,120 votes compared to Labour’s 16,834 votes by Alex Ross, Alexander Butler - The Independent - Jul 6, 2024 - Archive
Last but not least: the book adopts an unusual style for notes, it does not show them. Mind you it has about 45 pages of notes, if that is, you can find them. Suppose that you are reading page 190. Turns out it has 6 notes but to find them you have to go to the back to page 431 and see 6 phrases that have notes and then return to page 190 and try to identify the phrases. I did an LLM search using ChatGPT and here is part of the response:
The convention of using superscript numbers or other markers to indicate footnotes or endnotes in texts can be traced back to ancient times, with roots in classical antiquity and the medieval period.
Classical Antiquity: The use of marginal notes, glosses, and symbols to reference related texts or comments was present in classical texts. For example, in ancient Greek and Roman manuscripts, scholars would add marginalia and interlinear notes.
Who could have thought? Was it a marketing decision, not willing to scare of potential buyers? We would probably never know.
Bottom line on the book: Goodman has defined WEF in such a limited way that does not do justice to the influence and the threats emanating from the organization. He is after all writing for the NY Times, perhaps he can’s see but more probably he does not want to be controversial or conspiratorial. Someone needs to write the definite book on WEF at some point.
Started: Mon, Apr 8, 2024
No comments:
Post a Comment