Davos: More Redistribution Answer to ‘Scary’ Populism

[WestVirginiaRebel]

Breitbart:

“I want to be loud and clear: populism scares me,” a leading global investment fund manager has told the World Economic Forum in Davos, setting the scene for the conference at large.

As Donald Trump prepares for his inauguration as President of the United States on Friday, global business and political leaders gathering at the Swiss ski resort are looking ahead to a year which could deliver further seismic shocks to the establishment – and the talk among them is of how to counter the rising populism which threatens to break up the current world order.

 

While stopping short of saying that the west was descending into fascism, Ray Dalio, founder of Bridgewater Associates, told a packed audience that rising inequality is producing a shift towards political extremism.

 

“I want to be loud and clear: populism scares me. It is the extremes,” he said, during a debate with Harvard professor Larry Summers, International Monetary Fund (IMF) chief Christine Lagarde, and others on a Bloomberg panel in Davos, Business Insider has reported.

 

“If you study the 1930s to understand what the wealth gap was in the 1930s, it rhymes. Populism is not just the belief that there is a wealth gap, although the wealth gap is the highest since the 1930s.

“In the 1930s every government that existed practically was populist. So populism by definition is nationalist and protectionist. And it’s also a matter of values. There is a sense of threat, my country is losing its values to internationalism.”

 

He added: “The No. 1 issue economically as a market participant is how populism manifests itself over the next year or two.”

 

Dalio’s company manages “about $150 billion in global investments for approximately 350 of the largest and most sophisticated institutional clients”, according to their website.

 

Lagarde showed similar concern over inequality, warning that, while the middle classes are growing globally, the squeeze being felt by them in the developed world is driving people towards ‘populism’.

“Policymakers need to get the signals now and think what can be done,” she said, adding: “But it needs to be granular, it needs to be regional, it needs to be focused on what will people get out of it and it probably means more redistribution than we have in place at the moment.”

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Share the wealth? You first.