WTF moments from the WEF and how to separate signal from noise
The World Economic Forum (WEF) annual meeting overtook Davos, Switzerland from 19 to 23 January this year, bringing with it the usual crowd of do-gooders, fools, global leaders, hangers-on and narcissists. Somewhat bizarrely, many who take to the main stages at this event manage to straddle all five of those categories.
Battling for clicks and impressions
The circus is accompanied by its usual posse of reporters, battling one another for clicks and impressions online. Story lines are dominated by climate-aligned groups howling from the sidelines about the number of jets parked on Swiss soil; left-leaning media celebrating speeches by Canada’s Carney and France’s Macron; and conservatives reposting soundbites from Argentina’s Milei and the United States’ Trump. And although they do not feature at the main tables, the world’s business elite circle like vultures around a fresh kill.
Everyone has an opinion, dear reader. In a report titled Davos in the Sky, Greenpeace noted that 709 additional private jet flights were recorded at airports around Davos during the week of the 2025 forum, roughly one private jet flight for every four WEF participants – a trend that persists into the current year. “It is pure hypocrisy that the world’s most powerful and super-rich elite discuss global challenges and progress in Davos, while they literally burn the planet with the emissions of their private jets,’ complained Herwig Schuster, Greenpeace aviation campaigner.
The mainstream media has a field day too, lambasting speeches based on personalities rather than content. A mid-week economic and political outlook presentation held in South Africa illustrates the problem. “I watched an hour of Trump’s press conference last night, and I have no idea what he said,” declared the keynote speaker. “But I watched 30 seconds of Carney, and he blew me away.” Your writer has seen similar pronouncements on LinkedIn and other social media platforms, now awash with self-anointed commentators who dismiss everything an unpopular politician says based on the 45 seconds they can endure.
Countless superficial framings
This superficial framing is evident at countless asset manager presentations. Fund managers drift into expressions of admiration or disdain for political leaders rather than interrogating the policy mechanics that actually drive markets. It is often easier to condemn energy, fiscal, immigration or regulatory decision-making than to do the heavy lifting required to determine how these policy shifts will impact bonds, cash, commodities and equities. The risk to investors is that politics and sentiment drown out financial market insight.
An early-2026 encounter with a global asset manager illustrates how it should be done. The brand posited that political noise should not be taken at face value, but cautioned that the President of the United States still exerts heavy influence on policy decision-making. They reframed current geopolitics as part of a broader structural shift that predated Trump, saying that “the invisible hand of Adam Smith that used to guide free markets is now a very visible hand of government intervention, dictating where money goes and where policy lies.”
Contrast this with the way many prominent asset managers have framed Trump-related risk entering 2026. They warn that financial markets feel chaotic and suggest that capital should steer clear of US assets altogether. This line of commentary is often anchored in discomfort with the US President rather than a forensic examination of macro factors. It is also worth noting that broader structural trends are unfolding that no politician can easily sway. Case in point, there are growing signs that the US dollar has entered a multi-year weakening cycle.
How to drown out the substance
Returning to Trump at the WEF 2026, your writer confesses finding it hard to sit through the self-congratulation and extended detours that often drown out the substance of the current US President’s message. Even so, he endured 45 minutes of the hour-plus-long address to extract the core themes, relying on the official WEF transcript for the rest. These messages are simple, and had they been delivered in 15 to 20 minutes, with less theatre, they would probably have landed better.
Imagine, for example, your favourite politician said the following about your country. We are putting our country and citizens first by securing the borders and enforcing immigration laws. We are working with like-minded countries to bring an end to conflicts claiming thousands of lives, including the war in Ukraine. We are redoubling efforts to restore balance in energy supply by expanding domestic production and rolling back policies that have driven up prices. We are getting tough on corruption, waste and bureaucracy to ensure taxpayers’ money is spent in the public interest.
Furthermore, we are pushing for voter identification so that those who have a say in how the country is governed have a rightful claim to participate. We are pushing back against inconsistent drug pricing policies that leave our citizens paying more than anywhere else in the world. And we are trying to acquire a strategic tract of land to fulfil our promise to defend our citizens and sovereignty.
Rather than engaging with these underlying messages, the mainstream media dives into the fluff. You can thus expect a disproportionate share of WEF coverage to gravitate towards Trump’s comments on Greenland and NATO, stripped of context and reframed as provocation.
The first nations whataboutism…
The substantive point, that the United States views Greenland as a strategic defence asset and is prepared to negotiate for its acquisition, a process well established through the annals of history, is quickly lost amid selective outrage.
Nobody even comments on the irony of the more recent trend among progressives to recognise the original landowners, raising the obvious question: how did Denmark come to own this sheet of ice in the first place? A similar pattern follows Trump’s comments on NATO funding and burden sharing. The narrative defaults to US bad, rest of NATO good. Or more realistically, Trump bad, NATO ex US good.
The other magnet for media coverage is numerical excess. Claims of defeated inflation, record economic growth, trillions in investment and sharply reduced trade deficits invite fact-checking and scepticism. You will get no argument from this hack, except for the gentle counter that politicians have always spun statistics to suit their narrative, and that it often takes time for some trends to materialise. Trump’s challenge remains to strip boastfulness from objectivity, and to abandon the “mine is much, much bigger and better than yours” mentality. Put differently, his presentation is stronger without the numbers.
Trump’s grandstanding on healthcare savings prompted a quick chat with Grok AI about elementary school arithmetic. In the Davos address, the President switched between claiming drug prices would fall by up to 90% and savings of six, seven, eight hundred or even a thousand percent. That is not how numbers work. A price cannot be reduced by more than 100% because it reduces to zero at that point. Confusing percentage savings with price multiples may inflate a headline, but it weakens the underlying policy signal and invites ridicule.
A more accommodating, common-sense world
How do we fix this, and how can each of us be part of the shift towards a more accommodating, common-sense world?
It starts with refusing to align our thinking with reporting that is skewed towards a predetermined narrative or optimised for outrage. Whether you are a commentator, investor, policymaker or simply a casual reader, the discipline is the same. Interrogate the content, separate assertion from evidence, and resist the emotional hooks embedded in the framing. If a piece leaves you angry or indignant before it leaves you informed, the message has probably been engineered for reaction.
Your writer hopes Trump finds a way to strip bravado from his delivery, and that the media focuses on substance over clicks. Until then, the responsibility sits with the reader to filter the news, think independently and react on the evidence. That, at least, is a practical place to start.
Follow the writer on
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gareth-stokes-media/
X: @stokesmedia
