A chance to rub shoulders with business and politics elite

The minimum $20,000 entry fee has been paid. Fur hats and silk underwear are in the luggage. And stacks of business cards are ready to be slipped into the palms of the business and political elite gathering this week at the snowy alpine fortress that is the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

 

For the more than 2,500 people making the pilgrimage this year, some personalities will command more attention than others. On the Continent, where fears of the euro's imminent demise dominated thinking for the last year, Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany and the president of the European Central Bank, Mario Draghi, are being credited rather than pilloried these days for saving the euro from disaster.

 

Together with Prime Minister Mario Monti of Italy and the International Monetary Fund's managing director, Christine Lagarde, they will be among the keynote speakers on whether Europe's fortunes will at last take a turn for the better.

 

Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain may throw cold water on that idea, if he attends. But in Davos, if he does turn up, his main task might be to explain why investors should not be spooked by his warning that Britain may drift away from the European Union.

 

With plenty of dynamism stirring outside Europe, emerging markets leaders will be making the case for investment dollars to flow their way. Executives and academics from China and India will swarm the halls to discuss the evolution in their economic climate, which has cooled since a year ago but remains well ahead of those in Western economies.

 

Prime ministers from a number of African countries will also make the trek to explain how dynamism continues to build, especially on the southern part of the continent. Two years after the Arab Spring unfolded, numerous decision-makers from North Africa will outline plans for overhauls and address the political, social and economic transitions, and upheavals, in their countries. With fighting in Mali still making headlines and the Algerian gas-field hostage disaster still being sorted out, North African issues are very likely to be prime topics.

 

Not everyone has been panting to get to Davos. Officials from the United States, for example, will barely be represented. But those coming - including Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., a regular at the forum, and Susan Rice, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and erstwhile candidate to be the next secretary of state - are likely to stir controversy.

 

And some of the highest-wattage regulars are turning their attention elsewhere. Three notable absentees will be the top Google executives, Sergey Brin, Larry Page and Eric E. Schmidt. (For Schmidt, Davos evidently doesn't have the same allure as North Korea, where he visited recently.) Google has not said why they are not attending.

 

But some other men with big money will be on hand, though Jamie Dimon, the chief of JPMorgan Chase, can't count on quite as much money as before, now that the bank's board had decided to dock his pay after a multibillion-dollar trading loss in 2012. Stephen A. Schwarzman of the Blackstone Group, Brian T. Moynihan of Bank of America and George Soros will all be sniffing out investments. So will Lloyd C. Blankfein, the head of Goldman Sachs, who has shunned Davos in the past but decided to join the party this time.

 

It's not all about deals, though. Bill and Melinda Gates, hardy Davos perennials, will again be there to preach the need to invest in what counts for future generations: education, health and related philanthropic activity.

 

For celebrity sizzle, the South African actress Charlize Theron will be in town to promote her Africa Outreach Project. The forum had discouraged celebrities for a while after Sharon Stone stole the show in 2005 and Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie did the same the following year. Since then, a few stars have swanned in, mostly, it seems, out of curiosity.

 

Last year, Mick Jagger sidled into a spate of private Davos parties wearing a velvet plum jacket and a lilac shirt, speaking eruditely about current events with people like Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, before busting a few lanky dance moves late in the evening.

 

This year, another power broker expected to prowl the corridors is Derek Jeter, captain of the New York Yankees. Whether anyone will consider face time with him a must probably depends on their attitudes toward American baseball generally, and the widely followed Yankees specifically.

 

© 2013, The New York Times News Service