Davos Set to Provide an Alpine View on the World’s Hot Spots

The organizers of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland want attendees to focus on the challenges of the future: The theme of this year’s annual meeting is Mastering the Fourth Industrial Revolution, a catchall rubric that describes advances in technologies such as artificial intelligence and robotics. The problems of the here and now, though, are likely to be a more popular topic of discussion.

Among the assembled politicians, chief executive officers, and financiers will be many key players in simmering global crises, including China’s stock market meltdown, the emerging cold war between Iran and Saudi Arabia, and Russia’s economic slump. They’ll be meeting a couple of weeks after billionaire George Soros, a Davos stalwart, warned that the China-induced turmoil in financial markets is starting to remind him of “the crisis we had in 2008.”