Columnist Trudy Rubin makes an important comparison between this year’s World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, and previous meetings:

What a difference a year makes. Davos 2008 has laid bare a world in which no superpower seems to be in charge. The unipolar American moment is deemed over, in part a casualty of the Bush administration’s political and economic policies, in larger part the result of global economic changes that are shifting wealth elsewhere.But we have not entered a multipolar world: China and India, though on the rise, aren’t ready to take the global lead, nor can Europe do so. The consensus at Davos seems to be that we now live in a “nonpolar” world, with America too strong to stand on the sidelines, but too weak to implement its agenda alone.

At the Telegraph, Edmund Conway makes a similar point about what a difference one year makes. In his article “U.S. recession will dwarf dotcom crash,” Conway wrote,

The views of Stephen Roach, one of the world’s leading economists, now heading the Asian wing of Morgan Stanley, would have seemed outrageous at last year’s World Economic Forum.It is a sign of the times that they are now close to the consensus. This year’s event has been dominated by discussions of the stock market slump on both sides of the Atlantic, the Federal Reserve’s emergency interest rate cut and the SocGen fraud disaster.But underlying everything has been the silent truth that the U.S. is facing a very possible recession, and is fast having to adapt to a far less enjoyable economic climate.”We have, as relatively sophisticated, well-developed economies, gotten hooked on credit as never before,” said Roach, speaking about the UK and U.S. “If we had been running our economies the old-fashioned way, for example, where saving and consumption were funded by income, maybe we wouldn’t be in this mess we are in now.”