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Always Bet Against the Davos Man
Israeli President Isaac Herzog attends the World Economic Forum annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland on January 21, 2025. (Halil Sagirkaya via Getty Images)
This year, everyone here is bullish on MAGA. That’s your cue to take the other side of the trade.
By Niall Ferguson
01.23.25 — The Big Read
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DAVOS, Switzerland — Eight years ago, Davos Man mocked Donald Trump. Five years ago, he despised Trump. But in 2025, the mood at the World Economic Forum has completely changed.

The great American vibe shift has made it to Davos, and the European business elite badly wants a piece of it. Two days of trudging up and down the Promenade—the main drag of the Swiss ski resort town where the WEF is held each year—were enough to convince me of that.

True, the WEF propaganda remains fixated on Environmental, Social, and Governance issues, and, of course, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion—the familiar, woke-globalist acronyms ESG and DEI, now supplemented with AI. The corporate billboards still burble their word salads about resilience and sustainability. But talk to the chief executives and a very different picture emerges.

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Niall Ferguson
Sir Niall Ferguson, MA, DPhil, FRSE, is the Milbank Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and a senior faculty fellow of The Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard. He is the author of 16 books, including The Pity of War, The House of Rothschild, and Kissinger, 1923-1968: The Idealist, which won the Council on Foreign Relations Arthur Ross Book Award. He is a columnist with The Free Press. In addition, he is the founder and managing director of Greenmantle, a New York-based advisory firm, a co-founder of the Latin American fintech company Ualá, and a co-founding trustee of the new University of Austin.
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