Economic power as a cudgel
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How did President Trump’s Greenland comments shape the tone at Davos?
The dispute over Greenland might be smoothed over. Transatlantic relations are not. From Marketplace, I'm Sabri Beneshour, in for David Brancaccio. The World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, wraps up today. What is usually a pretty quiet event started under a cloud. President Trump's increasingly threatening language over wanting to acquire Greenland. The summit has ended with what the president said is a framework deal that would avoid a new trade war with European allies. But for some of those allies, Davos settled something else, that they can no longer see the U.S. as a reliable partner and that they need to look elsewhere. Marketplace's Nova Sappho has that.
One of the defining moments of the World Economic Forum this year was a speech by Canada's Prime Minister Mark Carney.
Great powers have begun using economic integration as weapons. Tariffs as leverage. Financial infrastructure as coercion. Supply chains as vulnerabilities to be exploited.
Carney went on to say the world is in the midst of a rupture of old alliances, and middle powers like Canada need to band together.
He received a standing ovation, which really doesn't happen.
Davos is a very buttoned-down place. Cal Roustiella is director of the UCLA Burkle Center for International Relations. He says Carney's comments echoed frustrations over a year of erratic policies from the Trump administration.
I think Greenland was sort of the straw that broke the camel's back because it was more than just tariffs.
It was, he says, using economic power as a cudgel to demand territory from an ally. Liliana Rojas Suarez of the Center for Global Development says American economic power is waning, as witnessed by the U.S. dollar, still the world's reserved currency, but showing signs of weakness.
Holdings of gold by central banks around the world is now larger than holdings of U.S. dollar. That is something that has not happened in many, many years.
A sign, she says, of the degradation of U.S. credibility. That's already had ripple effects. Ahead of Davos, Canada inked a trade deal with China, in part easing tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles, tariffs that had been imposed in partnership with the U.S. I'm Novosafo for Marketplace.
After years of fighting for its life in the U.S., TikTok looks to be here to stay. The social media platform's Chinese owner ByteDance said Thursday it has worked out a deal to create a joint venture to run its U.S. operations that is majority American-owned. ByteDance said the joint venture would secure U.S. data and protect U.S. national security and would have final say over content moderation. In 2024, Congress passed a law banning TikTok unless it was sold to a U.S. entity. President Trump gave it some extensions to figure things out. 200 million people in the U.S. use the app.
Yesterday, we got an inflation snapshot of the U.S. economy from the Bureau of Economic Analysis. It found that prices were up 2.8 percent in November compared to the year before. The data also show that consumers saved less and less as 2025 went on as they spent more and more overall.
What did Mark Carney warn about economic power being used as a weapon?
This spending is propping up the U.S. economy, yes, but a lot of it is from higher income households. Middle and lower income households are actually cutting back. That is the data. Marketplace's podcast, This is Uncomfortable, talked to people to get a sense of how financially secure Americans actually feel right now. Here's host Rima Grace.
We asked New Yorkers on the street a deceptively simple question. How much money would you need to feel secure right now? What would feel like enough?
I could make somewhere over a hundred grand. That'd be good. Half a million dollars. Enough would be 400,000 a year.
Shoot, enough. It's like my wife not to be working as much.
I base it off of my anxiety. Am I able to feel like there's a safe number in my bank account?
That was Nico, Richard, Claude, Itzy, and Daryl.
How are allies reacting to perceived U.S. unreliability after Davos?
Researchers who've looked at this question of how much is enough say that we tend to treat it as a moving target. Shige Oishi is a psychology professor at the University of Chicago.
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