Foreign.
Hello, and welcome to the Bulletin with UBS on Monaco Radio.
Each week, the sharpest minds and freshest thinkers in finance take you beyond the numbers and hype right to the heart of the big issues of the day.
This past week, the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting 2025 convened global leaders up in the high Alps to address key global and regional challenges.
These include responding to geopolitical shocks, stimulating growth to improve living standards and stewarding a just and inclusive energy transition.
The WEF, this time around was looking through a lens of collaboration for the intelligent Age.
To look back on the week and to unpack his recent blog on the threat of scapegoat economics published around the wef, I'm delighted to say we're once again joined by Paul Donovan, chief Economist in UBS Global Wealth Management.
Paul Donovan, always great to, to chat to you and I think interesting obviously to look at what you've been musing about during the World Economic Forum, of course, in Davos.
And before we talk about some of your, your pronouncements, just, just give me a quick thought in terms of narratives, obviously the, the lens of the weft, this edition was collaboration for the Intelligent Age, and we had the same convening of all sorts of different, diverse global leaders.
What did you make, Paul, in terms of, you know, pronouncements that came out of from Davos up in the High Alps last week?
Anything catch your attention in particular?
Well, of course, you know, for a gathering that was supposed to be looking at collaboration, there was a certain amount of perhaps disunity that was coming through.
President Trump from the United States gave a televised address at Davos which seemed to suggest, for example, universal tariffs, was quite nationalistic in tone and has not particularly stressed the collaboration that the summit was looking to achieve.
So I think that it is a mixture of aims and ambitions towards collaboration from certain groups, but then also the flip side of that, the rise of economic nationalism in particular was on display.
And this, I think, is going to be an area of ongoing tension which hopefully gatherings like the World Economic Forum can try and resolve.
But the modern politics has perhaps undermined a little bit of what Davos was trying to achieve.
Yeah.
Well, Paul, let's then talk a little bit about scapegoat economics.
I know this is what you've been, you were writing around in the sort of context of Davos and actually some of the ideas that you've just mentioned and some of the agendas maybe speak to this.
Just tell me first of all about scapegoat economics.