VIDEO: Asean economies continue growth

Climate and governance dominate the World Economic Forum's eighth-annual Global Risks report published this week.

The paragraphs below come courtesy of Mark Mobius, emerging markets guru and executive chairman of Templeton Asset Management.

If Davos is getting old, as I speculated on this blog earlier this week, the question is what will take its place? I spent my last day at the World Economic Forum trying to suss that out. The New Yorker‘s John Cassidy, who was not invited to Davos this year, posits that the WEF is a positional good—one whose value is “is mostly a function of its desirability to others.” If so, the naysayers who poopoo the event and wish it would go away “have the power to make it do precisely that – by ignoring it,” muses the FT‘s John McDermott.

If Davos is getting old, as I speculated on this blog earlier this week, the question is what will take its place? I spent my last day at the World Economic Forum trying to suss that out. The New Yorker‘s John Cassidy, who was not invited to Davos this year, posits that the WEF is a positional good—one whose value is “is mostly a function of its desirability to others.” If so, the naysayers who poopoo the event and wish it would go away “have the power to make it do precisely that – by ignoring it,” muses the FT‘s John McDermott.

By Kirk Lindstrom:Yesterday on CNBC, Anthony Scaramucci, managing director of SkyBridge Capital, reported in a short segment from Davos, Switzerland with his top four picks based on "Macro Phenomena." Scaramucci founded SkyBridge Capital in 2005 to be an incubator for hedge funds, to seed the best talent. In 2010 SkyBridge acquired the Citigroup Alternative Investment - Hedge Fund Management Group.

As participants of the annual World Economic Forum gather in Davos, Simon Jack looks ahead at the agenda and asks whether the event can do any good.

Maarten Spek submits: The upswing in resource prices continues. From a fundamental perspective this is no surprise. As the US, Japan, and Europe pursue an unremittingly loose monetary policy, credit supply to the “real” economy is more or less stagnant. Therefore a lot of capital is available for speculation. In addition, growth rates (and the anticipated returns) in the emerging economic nations outpace those in the West, whereas the former consume relatively high quantities of commodities.