DAVOS, Switzerland - The worst financial crisis since the Great Depression hovered over the opening of the annual World Economic Forum while business leaders in custom suits debated state-led bailouts and worried that efforts to counter climate change would fall by the wayside.
Politicians, well-heeled business leaders and well-meaning activists and celebrities gathered under a pall of gloom that has seen personal fortunes trimmed, companies shuttered and hundreds of thousands jobs lost.
People are "depressed and traumatized," Rupert Murdoch, chief executive of News Corp. noted on the first full day of the forum, adding that worldwide some "$50 trillion of personal wealth" had vanished since the crisis worsened with the Sept. 15 collapse of Lehman Bros. Co.
"The size of the problem confronting us today is larger than in the 1930s," said billionaire philanthropist George Soros.
The scope of the decline was evident even among the gift bags that attendees -- who pay thousands of dollars to participate -- received this year. Instead of loaded personal digital assistants, fine Swiss chocolates and gadgets they got basic, blue-hued pedometers instead.
Some of the biggest players contributing to the economic slide stayed away, some of them bankrupt or fired. So did top economic policy-makers in U.S. President Barack Obama's new administration.
Previous years saw a raft of A-list star power -- Claudia Schiffer, Angelina Jolie and U2 frontman Bono. This year it's Peter Gabriel and film star Jet Li.
Despite talk of more regulation and government intervention, there were pleas for free-market capitalism.
"Don't let's lose sight of what creates wealth. It is open markets, it is capitalism," said Murdoch.
Economist Stephen Roach gave a grim forecast for the global economic outlook, saying growth worldwide for the next three years was only likely to be about 2.5 per cent -- what the Morgan Stanley Asia chairman and longtime Davos attendee termed a "near recession." That compares with five per cent growth over the last four and a half years.
But even that was deemed optimistic by some other participants.
Experts said stimulus packages being approved by developed countries wouldn't be enough to pull the world out of the current crisis, with some calling instead for a co-ordinated fiscal response with a greater role for multilateral institutions like the Group of 20 wealthy and developing countries.
"Based on our experience, a capital injection is not enough," said Heizo Takenaka, the director of Global Security Research Institute at Japan's Keio University.
Not everyone welcomed the increasing role of governments in resolving the crisis, but Martin Sorrell, CEO of the British advertising company WPP, said government's hand was necessary until the system can be restored.
"You will get government out when private industry has re-established confidence," he said. "We all know government cannot run banks but at the moment no one has confidence in the financial institutions."
The crisis already is drying up investment in developing countries, said South Africa's Finance Minister Trevor Manuel. He warned that "hurried interventions" -- in the form of huge stimulus packages -- may "lead to naught."
"We see a lemming like approach trying to get to the precipice first without having any idea what that money will do."
At the same time, he said the crisis already is drying up money for developing countries, citing 48 mining projects in the Republic of Congo that are "in various stages of abandonment."
Among the 2,500 participants in Davos are over 40 heads of state who will discuss this year's theme of "shaping the post-crisis world" in fields such as energy, climate change and free trade. They include British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, European Commission president Jose Manuel Barroso, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Japanese Prime Minister Taro Aso.
Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin was to give the keynote address Wednesday, shortly after Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao.
In response to Wen's appearance, dozens of Tibetans and others met near a Davos train station, chanted "Free Tibet" and held signs with similar political slogans. One read: "Change in Tibet W(H)EN?"
