By Anil Wasif

January 21, 2026

In January 1971, a German economist named Klaus Schwab invited 444 executives to a Swiss ski resort to discuss American management techniques. The timing was deliberate. Europe was anxious about falling behind, the postwar order was fraying, and President Richard Nixon was months away from unilaterally ending the gold standard.

Schwab called his gathering the European Management Forum. In 1987, it became the World Economic Forum, and Davos became shorthand for a certain vision of globalization, one where CEOs and prime ministers mingled on snow-covered terraces and the implicit promise was that getting the right people in a room could bend the arc of history toward cooperation.

For 45 years, Schwab was synonymous with Davos. He coined “stakeholder capitalism.” He hosted every major post-Cold War leader. He positioned the forum as globalization’s conscience, or to its critics, its most gilded alibi.

This January, Schwab wasn’t there. Pushed out in April 2025 following a whistleblower investigation, cleared of “material wrongdoing” but not invited back, the founder watched the 56th annual meeting from the outside. In his place: Larry Fink, CEO of BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, serving as interim co-chair. The reorientation, we’re told, is toward “economics.”

The transition fits a forum spending the week grappling with two questions. The current leader of the country that underwrote the postwar order sees sovereign countries as acquisitions rather than allies.

The people building AI openly predict it will eliminate half of entry-level white-collar jobs, and they admit they’re already seeing it inside their own companies. There is a collision of geopolitical and economic disruption looming, and it seems that the players best equipped to exploit it are also the best prepared.

The theme of Davos 2026 is ‘A Spirit of Dialogue’. So far, the week has delivered something more like a reckoning.

On the new world order, Mark Carney delivered the most quoted address of the week if not the decade on Tuesday. “Let me be direct,” he said. “We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition. The old order is not coming back. Nostalgia is not a strategy.”

Carney argued that middle powers can no longer rely on multilateral institutions to constrain great-power behavior. For years, countries like Canada bet on the WTO, the COP, and other UN agencies to keep great powers in check. That bet has failed. “Great powers have begun using economic integration as weapons,” he said. “Tariffs as leverage. Financial infrastructure as coercion. Supply chains as vulnerabilities to be exploited.”

As I wrote in a recent Policy column , the Carney government has been signalling this shift for months. At Davos, Carney made it doctrine. His alternative: “variable geometry,” different coalitions for different issues, built around shared values rather than inherited institutions.

He pointed to a proposed TPP-EU bridge creating a 1.5-billion-person trading bloc, critical minerals “buyers’ clubs” anchored in the G7, and AI cooperation among democracies. “The middle powers must act together,” Carney said, “because if we’re not at the table, we’re on the menu.”

In his speech the next day, Donald Trump responded. Trump arrived with the largest U.S. delegation in the forum’s history, called for “immediate negotiations” to acquire Greenland, threatened 200 percent tariffs on French wine, and mocked Carney by name. “Canada gets a lot of freebies from us. They should be grateful,” he said, in what sounded uncannily per multiple observers like an impression of Marlon Brando in The Godfather.

He also said something markets had been waiting to hear about his designs on Greenland: “I won’t use force.” By day’s end, he announced a framework deal with NATO on Greenland, suspended the threatened tariffs, and left declaring victory. Markets, which had plummeted the day before, immediately rebounded.

The underlying message was not conciliatory. He questioned whether NATO allies would defend America. He said, in what was generally seen as the racist dog-whistle, that certain places in Europe are “not recognizable anymore.” He framed the postwar consensus as a failed experiment that enriched elites while hollowing out nations. Several attendees told reporters they found the speech “frightening.”

The theme of Davos 2026 is ‘A Spirit of Dialogue’. So far, the week has delivered something more like a reckoning.

Emmanuel Macron opened with dark humor, wearing aviator sunglasses and joking, “It’s a time of peace, stability, and predictability.” The audience laughed.

Then his tone shifted. “We are living through a shift toward autocracy,” he said. “A world without rules, where the only law that seems to matter is that of the strongest.” He denounced tariffs used as “leverage against territorial sovereignty.” “We do prefer respect to bullies,” he said. The next day, Trump threatened 200 percent tariffs on French wine.

Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, tried to build around the rupture rather than simply condemn it. Von der Leyen pointed to the EU-Mercosur agreement, signed days before in Paraguay, the largest free trade zone in the world, covering 31 countries and over 700 million consumers.

She announced advancing negotiations with India (the “mother” of all deals), the Philippines, Thailand, Malaysia, and the UAE. “Europe will always choose the world,” she said. The message was clear. America is retreating from the architecture it built. Europe, in concert with Canada per Carney’s speech, will build its own.

On technology, executives debated something arguably more consequential for ordinary workers: what artificial intelligence is about to do to employment. The split is stark, and cuts through even the companies building the technology.

Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, offered the most bullish vision, describing AI as the largest infrastructure buildout in human history and arguing it will create jobs, not destroy them. Radiologists, he noted, have increased in number since AI began reading scans. AI allows them to see more patients, which increases demand, which requires more radiologists. The same dynamic, he predicted, will play out across industries.

Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, was more cautious. AI’s benefits must spread beyond the largest firms, he warned, or the boom risks becoming a bubble. “A telltale sign of a bubble would be if all we are talking about are the tech firms,” he said.

Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, offered the starkest warning. He is already seeing AI reduce the need for junior workers inside his own company. “I can look forward to a time where on the more junior end, and then on the more intermediate end, we actually need less and not more people,” Amodei said. His prediction that AI could eliminate half of all entry-level white-collar jobs remains unchanged: “My worry is it will overwhelm our ability to adapt.”

Kristalina Georgieva, Managing Director of the IMF, provided the institutional data. “A tsunami is hitting the labour market,” she said. The IMF calculates that 40 percent of jobs globally are already being affected, rising to 60 percent in advanced economies. AI could boost global growth by up to 0.8 percent, she noted, but she warned of an “accordion of opportunities,” with benefits concentrated in some places and absent in others.

The most striking moments so far have come from the financiers. Fink opened the forum by admitting Davos feels “out of step with the moment.” “Elites in an age of populism,” he said. “An established institution in an era of deep institutional distrust. And there’s truth in that critique.”

Since the Cold War ended, Fink said, more wealth has been created than at any time prior in human history, but in advanced economies, that wealth has accrued to a far narrower share of people than any healthy society can ultimately sustain.

AI threatens to repeat the pattern. “Early gains are flowing to the owners of models, owners of data, and owners of infrastructure,” he said. “The open question: What happens to everyone else?”

Jamie Dimon, CEO of JP Morgan Chase, was blunter. “You didn’t do a particularly good job making the world a better place,” he told the audience. He declared himself a “globalist,” said he wants a stronger NATO and a strong Europe, and called for government-business collaboration to manage AI’s impact on workers. Asked about government limits on layoffs to prevent social unrest, Dimon said yes. “We would agree, to save society.”

While the major takeaway this year has been Mark Carney’s requiem for the rules-based order, the conversations about the changes that have ended that era are way ahead of him.

Something new is being built, in trade deals and coalitions, in AI labs and data centers, in the calculations of middle powers and the anxieties of workers. Davos, for better and worse, is where those choices are being debated.

Policy Columnist Anil Wasif is a public servant in the Ontario government. He serves on the University of Toronto’s Governing Council and the Advisory Board of McGill’s Max Bell School. Internationally, he serves on the OECD’s Infrastructure Delivery Committee. He co-owns and manages the Canada-born global non-profit BacharLorai. The views expressed are his own.