This year, optimists might therefore seek comfort in the prevailing fashion at the 2009 World Economic Forum for participants to eclipse the previous speaker with an ever more doom-laden prognosis. But those looking for cheer amid the gloom should take a moment to cast their minds back to one recent Davos prediction that has undoubtedly come true. In January 2006 Tim Adams, then the US Treasury's top international affairs official, spent his time defending the US from its detractors.

“You can't have a situation where everyone complains about US consumption and then drives their economic strategy to survive off that consumption,” he said three years ago. If excess US consumption ceased, national income would plunge by 6 per cent, he forecast, throwing the US and the rest of the world into a deep depression. That is now just what the world and the Davos regulars are contemplating as industrial production and trade slumps across the world.

The forum's organisers have attempted to focus attention on devising solutions to the mess but many participants were fearful that, even as the International Monetary Fund and International Labour Organisation yesterday confirmed the plight of the world economy, policymakers might instead follow beggar-thy-neighbour policies.