Chrystia Freeland

On last Thursday’s edition of Davos Today, Chrystia interviewed a top Google executive about the internet giant’s recent management shake-up; chatted with President Obama’s former chief economic adviser about the State of the Union; heard from America’s principal union leader on what lessons Germany and Japan can teach the U.S. economy; and more.  Here’s the video and the guest list:

* Nikesh Arora, Senior Vice President and Chief Business Officer, Google

* Larry Summers, Former Director of the National Economic Council and Former Secretary of the Treasury

* Min Zhu, Special Advisor to the Managing Director, International Monetary Fund

* Henry Blodget, Editor-in-Chief, The Business Insider

* Nouriel Roubini, Professor of Economics and International Business, NYU Stern School of Business

* Clay Shirky, Adjunct Professor, NYU Interactive Telecommunications Program

* Richard Trumka, President, AFL-CIO

* Susan Glasser, Editor-in-Chief, Foreign Policy

* Richard Haass, President, Council on Foreign Relations

* Sunil Godhwani, Chairman and Managing Director, Religare Enterprises Limited

Posted by Peter Rudegeair.

Last week at Davos, Chrystia anchored an hour-long daily talk show that featured many of the World Economic Forum’s most exciting participants.  Last Wednesday’s edition featured a segments on frugal innovation in India with two top Indian businessmen; the state of trust in business and government today with a behavioral economist and two CEOs; an appraisal of President Obama’s State of the Union from two pre-eminent economists; and more.  Here’s the video and the guest list:

* T.K. Kurien, CEO, Wipro IT

* Richard Edelman, President and CEO, Edelman

* Dan Ariely, James B. Duke Professor of Behavioral Economics, Duke University Fuqua School of Business

* L. Kevin Kelly, CEO, Heidrick & Struggles

* David Schlesinger, Editor-in-Chief, Reuters

* Raghuram Rajan, Eric J. Gleacher Distinguished Service Professor of Finance, University of Chicago Booth School of Business

Throughout its 900-year history, Oxford University has survived the Bubonic Plague, the English Civil War, and a host of other maladies. Oxford Vice Chancellor Andrew Hamilton takes solace in the University’s resilient history as he grapples with the decision by the UK coalition to slash funding for higher education by 80%:

[The budget cuts] are pretty bad. The challenge for us obviously is the speed with which we have to confront the issues that result from them… One of the proposals that has been recently passed by government in the UK is to allow the cost of undergraduate education charged to students to rise. And again, that is happening in a very short period of time. Changes of this significant kind–I think we would all much prefer to be able to manage the cuts and manage any rise in tuition fees that will occur over a longer period, but we’re not being given that luxury. We’re going to have to manage them over a very short period of time, as little as two or three years. And that is going to be quite the challenge.

In an interview with Chrystia at Davos last week, when asked how large the tuition increase would be at Oxford next year, Hamilton said diplomatically that “Oxford is a place that cherishes consultation and extensive discussion,” and that the decision on the fee level will not be made until the end of March.

The best line in U.S. President Barack Obama’s State of the Union address was his contention that “this is our generation’s Sputnik moment.”

It was smart because the essence of the idea is obviously true: Just as the Sputnik launching in 1957 terrified Americans with the prospect that they might lose their global scientific supremacy, the rise of the emerging markets, particularly China, has made them worry they could be losing their technological edge.

Mr. Obama’s evocation of NASA and the moon landing was an emotionally powerful reminder that Americans haven’t always viewed government investment – or even government spending – as an unequivocally bad thing.

‘‘The next 10 years is going to be the most exciting time in our lives!’’ said Tejpreet Singh Chopra, an Indian entrepreneur. ‘‘The Indian economy will double! It will be incredible!’’

It was hot and humid  —  typical spring weather in Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania. It was also late  —  close to midnight. But the enthusiastic Mr. Chopra, dressed in a still-crisp light  shirt with blue and white stripes, navy trousers and blue turban, was on his way to yet another meeting.

Mr. Chopra was in East Africa last May as one of the World Economic Forum’s Young Global Leaders, a sort of farm team for the full-grown global business elite that gathers every January in Davos.

UPDATE — Since I wrote this column early on Thursday morning, my prediction (in the final paragraph), that we would today hear more about Immelt and his ideas on how to create U.S. jobs has been vindicated: President Obama this morning appointed Immelt to lead his outside panel of economic advisers. To hear more from Immelt, watch my exclusive interview with him here.

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For Jeffrey Immelt, the CEO of General Electric, the 130 year-old American industrial behemoth, the financial crisis marked the end of the age of America’s economic dominance.

“I came to GE in 1982,” Immelt told me this week in Washington. “For the first 25 years, until the bubble crashed in 2007, the American consumer was the definitive driver of the global economy.” But Immelt said the future will be different. For the next 25 years, he said, the American consumer “is not going to be the engine of global growth. It is going to be the billion people joining the middle class in Asia, it is going to be what the resource-rich countries do with their new-found wealth of high oil prices. That’s the game.” A lot of that game will be played in China. At a moment when it is compulsory on the American right to pay homage to the exceptionalism of the United States, Immelt, a life-long Republican, is matter-of-fact about China’s inevitable rise.

Earlier this week in her exclusive interview with Jeff Immelt, Chrystia asked whether the GE head would replace Paul Volcker as chairman of President Obama’s outside panel of economic advisers.  Immelt ducked the question a bit, saying he would leave that decision to the President.  Today it became clear why he was noncommittal as the White House announced that Immelt will chair a new Council on Jobs and Competitiveness, the successor to the President’s Economic Recovery of Advisory Board which Paul Volcker chaired.

Watch Chrystia’s exchange with Immelt and read the transcript of his remarks below:

You know, I’m going to leave that alone. I’m going to leave it to the President. What I would say is that I think American companies and American CEOs need to be as constructive as we can be to help, you know, resolve some of these mistrusts and residue that exist in the environment today. 9.5% unemployment is not a tenable situation for any of us. You know, even though, it’s not directly my responsibility, in a broader sense, it’s all of our responsibilities. And so, I think there’s nothing wrong with working constructively with this President to try to drive growth and job creation.

As President Barack Obama’s new lieutenants settle into their offices in the White House, talk has turned again to the revolving door between Washington and Wall Street: William Daley, the president’s chief of staff, arrives from JPMorgan Chase, where he earned millions; Gene Sperling, the new top economic adviser, collected $887,727 from Goldman Sachs for advice on a charity project on a recent hiatus from government.

There’s nothing new about this tradition – indeed there was a time not so long ago when it seemed as if actually running Goldman Sachs was a prerequisite for serving as Secretary of the Treasury. But the triple whammy of the financial crisis, the trillion-dollar government bailout and the return of lavish bonuses to many on Wall Street while unemployment in the United States is stuck above 9 percent has cast the intimacy between political and business elites in a new, often more jaundiced light.

To many U.S. business people, and to centrists in both parties, the concern that Mr. Obama’s White House is too close to business sounds absurd. Far from being a dangerous example of an overly intimate relationship between business and politics, Mr. Obama’s recent appointments, particularly of Mr. Daley, are seen as a welcome sign that the White House will work harder to bring business onto its side.

Watch Chrystia and Reuters finance blogger Felix Salmon discuss how to find “frisson” at the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting at Davos, starting with that 20-minute cab ride with the Ayatollah.  Oh, and the reinstatement of Russia’s president – all because of Davos.

Posted by Peter Rudegeair.

For anyone who ever hoped Russia could become a liberal, free-market democracy, the grim trial last month of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the former oil tycoon who was once his country’s richest man, offered a slender solace—it was widely and loudly condemned.

David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker, compared the prosecution to that of the late poet and Nobel laureate Joseph Brodsky. Joe Nocera, writing about the business and economic consequences in The New York Times (whose global edition is the International Herald Tribune), described the Kremlin’s tactics as “boneheaded.” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton warned that the case would “have a negative impact on Russia’s reputation,” and particularly on its “investment climate.” What was notable about this chorus of foreign criticism was the implication that, even judged by the Kremlin’s own standards of realpolitik, the treatment of Mr. Khodorkovsky was a mistake. Moscow’s leaders want to restore Russia’s wealth and greatness: Western assertions that the Khodorkovsky trial had hurt Russia’s reputation and would discourage foreign investment suggested that the Kremlin was harming its own cause.

But some investors, economists and political analysts are drawing a different, and much starker, conclusion: The Khodorkovsky verdict was an inevitable and logical act of self-preservation by a regime that is fully and lucratively in control of Russia.