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Playing the Davos blame game!
Jenny Booth

Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao wags the finger at America at the World Economic Forum in Davos

Who can blame Barack Obama for not attending the Davos world economic summit, when everyone is piling into the new game in town - blaming America for causing the global financial crisis?

Russia and China started it, using the opening speeches to lambast America for bingeing on debt. At least, the audience assumed it was America Wen Jiabao, the Chinese premier, was talking about when he alluded to “inappropriate macroeconomic policies of some economies", before launching into a tirade against “prolonged low savings and high consumption” and “excessive expansion of financial institutions in blind pursuit of profit and the lack of self-discipline among financial institutions and ratings agencies”.

Vladimir Putin, the Russian prime minister, said he wasn't going to criticise the US, but did anyway.

He said: “I just want to remind you that just a year ago, American delegates speaking from this rostrum emphasised the US economy’s fundamental stability and its cloudless prospects. Today investment banks, the pride of Wall Street, have virtually ceased to exist. In just 12 months they have posted losses exceeding the profits they made in the last 25 years. This example alone reflects the real situation better than any criticism."

Even Mr Obama's Democrat predecessor got in on the act. Former president Bill Clinton may just have been trying to make friends with Mr Wen for the sake of his wife, the US's new foreign policy supremo, but did he really have to say: “The Chinese premier was right: It all started in the United States. America has to lead the way”?

Then he went off into a private room with Mr Putin for a 90 minute vodka-fuelled tete-a-tete.

Earlier the noted financier George Soros laid into the US Treasury and the Federal Reserve for triggering meltdown by failing to save Lehman Brothers. "How could Lehman have been left to go under?" he railed. "The responsibility lies squarely with the financial authorities, notably the Treasury and the Federal Reserve. The claim that they lacked the necessary legal powers is a lame excuse. In an emergency they could and should have done whatever was necessary to prevent the system from collapsing. That is what they have done on other occasions. The fact is, they allowed it to happen."

John Neill, chief executive of Unipart, declared that it was all the fault of the (mainly American) bankers who invented complex financial instruments. "If you knowingly make other kinds of toxic products, you go to jail. Why should bankers be different?" he asked, earning one of the biggest rounds of applause of the conference.

Amid apocryphal reports that those US bankers who were attending Davos were wearing dark glasses and false beards, Klaus Schwab, the founder of the annual economic and political summit, made a somewhat double-edged plea for the rest of the audience to show a little love. "Those people, and there are many of those here, have the feeling they are standing at a cliff and they may fall over at any moment. But those people are not only part of the problem. They are part of the solution," he urged.

One banker who did put his head above a parapet was Jamie Dimon, the head of the JPMorgan investment bank, who promptly accused Mr Obama and his government of talking down confidence. “JPMorgan would be fine if we stopped talking about (the) damn nationalisation of banks,” he said.

Mr Dimon did admit bankers had done “some really stupid things”, but quickly added that in any case the Basel II banking rules were flawed and the regulators weren't doing anything about it. “I haven’t yet seen people get all the right people in a room, close the damn door and come out with a solution,” he complained.

http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/economics/wef/article5612801.ece