Watch interviews with top business and world leaders including the following:

• Stephen Green
• Jeroen Van Der Veer
• Simon Crean
• Kris Gopalakrishnan
• John Chidsey
• Steve Pagliuca

Government in the driver’s seat, putting the brakes on unbridled capitalism, might be the theme at Davos this year. But the New York Stock Exchange is undeterred. It will ring the opening bell of the storied stock exchange on Friday from this snowy mountaintop.

This will “emphasize the spirit of the gathering and highlight the global markets of NYSE Euronext” it said in a press release. If the NYSE truly wants this to reflect the business atmosphere here, then the bell will have to be rung very slowly and in somber tones.

For full coverage of Davos 2009, click here.

Was letting Lehman go down the biggest mistake of the crisis? Many, including George Soros in the Financial Times, have argued that letting Lehman go down sowed panic to markets, consumers and businesses.

Not so fast, says Harvard historian Niall Ferguson, in an interview in Davos:

“My position is this is a typical error of historical understanding in which a single event is blamed for much more than it can possibly have caused. You can say ‘Hank Paulson is to blame for my troubles’ and if you can change one thing in the story it would have a happy ending.

It’s like saying if only Princip had not shot the Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914 there wouldn’t have been a First World War.

If you go through the events of September of last year you will find it incredibly hard to produce a counterfactual scenario in which it could have been possible to save both Merrill Lynch and Lehman. There is one bank which could be bought by Bank of America but there couldn’t have been two.

This is a crisis of too much bank leverage which began in August of 2007 and indeed had it roots far before. A bank leveraged 25-1 only needs a 4 percent decline in their assets to have their equity wiped out. And the notion that saving one investment bank could somehow have prevented or mitigated the crisis is a fantasy. The problem would have happened at some point somewhere else. There is a fundamental problem of bank solvency.”

Ferguson argues that without another buyer for one of the two, one would have needed to have been taken into a kind of Treasury conservatorship, as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were. But those were already quasi-government and such a move would have required Congressional approval, which given that Congress turned down the first version of the TARP, was not likely.

“Historical arguments need to be based on a credible counterfactual, ” Ferguson said. “Nobody has been able to tell me a credible story about how both Lehman and Merrill could have been saved. It wasn’t possible.”

My view is that the “Oh no, they killed Lehman” meme is just part of the denial phase of grieving. Few in financial circles wanted, or indeed want, to believe that things have changed fundamentally and that the good days won’t be coming back any time soon. Blaming mom and dad is the last first refuge of the adolescent.

Jim Saft is a Reuters columnist. Any views expressed are his own.

Stopping the housing crash is central to fixing the economy, and halting foreclosures would be a big step towards that, according to Ken Rosen from Berkeley, who is notable as being one of the economists who was suitably gloomy last year in Davos. Foreclosures cost 50-60 percent of the value of the mortgage whereas you might be able to keep someone in their house for 30 percent, he said. A house with a modified loan isn’t sold on, which further depresses house prices and errodes bank capital.

“What we need is a moratorium on foreclosure while we get a plan in place. We could have five to eight million more foreclosures in the U.S. if we don’t do something about this. Banks have already written down these mortgages.”

Big problem however is securities and contract low. Since so many of these mortgages are in complex mortgage securities it can be cumbersome or impossible to get everyone to agree to mods. The Fed is already moving to do just that on loans it has on itsbooks from Bear Stearns and AIG and is encouraging other owners to do the same.

A bad bank plan could also accelerate this, as the government will end up owning many more nonperforming mortgages which it can write down itself.

It is interesting to look at this in a British context, as they will be where the U.S. is shortly. There is a big difference between British and American law however, in that most U.S. mortgages are non-recourse, meaning that the lender can’t pursue the borrower for the money but can only collect the house as collateral. Not true in the UK, which has led some to argue that the house price falls will be less severe, as borrowers will be stuck with the house rather than banks. Simon Gleeson, partner in the London office of lawyers Clifford Chance, points out however that it usually doesn’t make sense to go after a borrower in the UK for their other assets, even if you have the legal right to.

“If they are giving up on what is usually their biggest asset, they probably don’t have too much else,” Gleeson said in Davos. So it was during the last UK crash, he said.

Bank of England loan mod programme anyone?

Jim Saft is a Reuters columnist. Any views expressed are his own.

Conventional wisdom has it that if the leaders of the world can’t agree on a round of negotiations to liberalise world trade then there’s no chance they will agree on measures to tackle climate change.

After all, a pact to cut greenhouse gas emissions will involve re-tooling vast swathes of industry and impact the way companies do business from Boston to Beijing.

But is that view right? British economist Nicholas Stern - author of a seminal report in 2006 on the economic fallout of global warming - thinks not.

“Actually, agreement on climate change, I think, will be easier than agreement on trade,” he told reporters in Davos. “People understand climate change much better than trade.”

The crunch will come in December, when world leaders meet in Copenhagen to hammer out a replacement for the current Kyoto protocol which expires in 2012.

Two years ago businessmen and leaders coming to the World Economic Forum in snowy Davos were still betting on economic expansion.

They got it wrong, but this has not put off about 2,500 CEOs and policy-makers from coming here in the hope of catching a glimpse of how the world will evolve.

“I am here to get an idea of where this crisis is going,” said Mario Moretti Polegato, Chairman and founder of Italian “no-sweat” shoe-maker Geox.

People have been coming to Davos since the early 1970s to “feel trends”, said Jean-Pierre Cuoni, chairman of private bank EFG International and a veteran at Davos.

“In 1988-89 you could already feel that Communism was coming to an end. People back home thought this was crazy. But only a year later the Berlin Wall fell,” he said while sipping a drink during a swanky reception at the Belvedere Hotel.

No one expects WEF participants to pull a solution to the crisis out of the hat in just a few days of discussions, but many feel the forum continues to be a great place to exchange ideas.

“The forum is needed now and these days more than ever,” Swiss President Hans-Rudolf Merz said as he addressed the forum on Wednesday.

Alan Greenspan hasn’t been chairman of the Fed for three years, but his policy mistakes keep paying dividends in the form of blame at this year’s World Economic Forum in Davos.

Polish Finance Minister Jacek Rostowski yesterday:

“This was the failure of one of the key institutions in the world.” During the Greenspan era he said they continually met downturns and distress with easing and “eliminated fear.”

Ken Rosen of Berkeley, who was writing about the housing bubble in 2005 or so, is in the same camp:

“Alan Greenspan personally prevented some needed regulations being put in place. The free market fundamentalism we had was a mistake, to go the other way would also be a mistake.

We had excessively loose monetary policy and regulations on these aggressive loans were not put in place. There were Fed board members who wanted to do it, and Greenspan himself said the had too much belief in the market. …it was a global problem of excess credit led by the central bank in the U.S. but ratified by the central banks around the world.”

Maybe history will be kinder to his reputation as a jazz musician.

James Saft is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.

Watch interviews with top business and world leaders including the following:

• Andrei Kostin
• Gerard Lyons
• Jean-Claude Trichet
• George Soros
• Tom Glocer

There’s no better way to start Davos than to see a string of top delegates breeze into your studios. On time. Happy to brave the cold in the early hours. Full of interesting comments and insight.

For the second year running, Reuters News is producing a live breakfast show for the World Economic Forum – Davos Today.

It has been months in the making. From designing a set that fits into the town library, to booking satellite paths, to contacting dozens of delegates to invite them on the programme. At 4 o’clock this morning, the adrenaline was pumping. It was time to pull the whole thing off.

Unlike yesterday’s practice when ice had coated a dish and messed up the satellite link, Reuters reporters in Hong Kong and London popped up perfectly on our screens as we went on air. Unlike last year when the first guest on one day overslept, all of the delegates turned up

And they didn’t disappoint on the news front either.

Morgan Stanley’s Stephen Roach gave his deep insight about Asia and why the new U.S. administration should not pick a fight with China over the yuan.

Sameer Al Ansari, head of Dubai International Capital, delivered a doomsday vision of the world economy. And BT’s Ian Livingston kept his eyes on future investments despite current pain.

Those and other great stories were written up for the Reuters wire and got us off to a great start on day one.

Now we have to do it all over again for rest of the meeting.

For full coverage of Davos 2009, click here.

Though a financial crisis and global recession have left many of the world’s biggest companies uncharacteristically humbled, that didn’t stop NGOs from taking shots at a few of them at the World Economic Forum.

U.S. gold company Newmont Mining and Swiss utility Bernische Kraftwerke picked up a couple of pretty dubious honors from Greenpeace Switzerland and the Berne Declaration.

Newmont received two awards — the Global Award and People’s Award — for its mining project in eastern Ghana. According to the NGOs, Newmont “is ignoring the environmental and social damage” the planned mine will create.

“If the project goes ahead, 10,000 farmers will lose their land and livelihood and cyanide, used to extract the gold, will poison the soil, water and wildlife,” they said in a statement.

Bernische Kraftwerke, on the other hand, received the Swiss Award “for pushing for the construction of a coal-fired power plant in Germany… Its plans blatantly contradict its self-promotion as a forward-looking company that promotes renewable energy and energy efficiency.”

There was one positive award given out on Wednesday, for ”most courageous employee of the year.” Two Colombian union leaders, Jairo Quiroz Delgado and Freddy Lozano, shared that award for their fight for workers’ rights at Colombia’s El Cerrejon coal mine.