Out of the Woods
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Out of the Woods

Seen and heard in the corridors of the Annual Meeting...

•/ Unintended iron-y:  Bali — laid back, happy, relaxed. Except when the English arrive with stroppy demands on the local laundry system. In a scene reminiscent of John Cleese’s comic hotelier Basil Fawlty, OOTW spotted an English gent in a three-star hotel lobby, clutching a wrinkled shirt and growing pucer by the moment. “What did you iron this with — your foot?” he demanded of a staffer, who responded with perfect reason that using the extremity of one’s animate being to press a piece of cotton, was, frankly, a futile and silly idea. 1-0 to the Balinese.

•/ Love Jacktually:  Alibaba’s pocket-sized founder Jack Ma was on good form in the main auditorium on Friday. Gently probed by World Bank president Jim Yong Kim about his magic formula for success and his ever-cheery demeanour, Ma said the trick lay not in IQ or EQ, but LQ. “Most important of all is our Love Quotient,” he said, to widespread applause. “Don’t think about what you will gain in order to succeed, but what you are willing to share — and willing to give up.”

•/ Carnal Carney:  Sir Howard Davies summoned the spirit of St Augustine when describing Mario Draghi’s approach to rate hikes as a simple case of “make me chaste, but not yet”. The venerable chairman of the Royal Bank of Scotland was less kind to Bank of England chief Mark Carney, describing the Canadian’s lurching Brexit-driven rates strategy as a classic example of “coitus interruptus”.

•/ Guinea foul:  Cash-strapped Papua New Guinea is mocked for importing 40 Maseratis to ferry foreign leaders around next month’s APEC summit. The gleaming ‘Quattroporte’ sedans cost $100,000 apiece and can hit 240km per hour, but will be limited to trundling around Port Moresby’s woebegone roads at a max speed of 80km/hr. But the real question for delegates in Bali forced to endure a patchy transport system and scrap over the occasional cab is: where’s our Italian supercar?

•/ Gimme bus-shelter: Speaking of which, the erratic bus “service” has been a pox on these meetings, with waiting times of up to 30 minutes in the baking sun. Spotting a captive market, the government sent out surveyors to query weary delegates in the searing heat. OOTW was asked for his spending plans in Bali, receiving in return a figurine of Shiva, the Hindi god of destruction and dance. What are they trying to tell us?

•/ Clutching at straws:  Ordering a fresh lime soda at the Nusa Dua Beach Club, Out of the Woods was heartened to see it served with one of those ocean-friendly bio-degradable paper straws — a move to hearten the European agencies behind the worthy $2.3bn Clean Oceans Initiative. Hotels are some of the worst climate polluters, but it’s great to see them, unprompted, doing their bit for the planet.

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