DAVOS, Switzerland - The World Economic Forum turned from the global economic crisis to politics and diplomacy Thursday with debates on the new U.S. administration, Iran's nuclear program and unrest in the Middle East, Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Israeli election front-runner Benjamin Netanyahu told a session that keeping nuclear weapons out Iran's hands was more important than the economy because the financial meltdown is reversible and a nuclear Iran wouldn't be.
"What is not reversible is the acquisition of nuclear weapons by a fanatic radical regime ... We have never had, since the dawn of the nuclear age, nuclear weapons in the hands of such a fanatical regime," he said.
Coming a day after warnings that the financial meltdown was not close to abating and growth remained on a slippery slope, OPEC warned it was ready to make more production cuts if oil prices don't start rising soon.
OPEC Secretary-General Abdalla Salem El-Badri, speaking at the annual meeting of business and government leaders in Davos, Switzerland, expressed hope that global oil demand would pick up "by the end of this year or beginning of next year."
El-Badri said OPEC members will have reached the group's pledge of a drop of 4.2 million barrels a day by the end of January.
After that "if we still have some downward problems, then OPEC will not hesitate to take some quantity out of the market," he said.
Later, officials were to discuss the recent fighting in Gaza, reactions to and hopes for the leadership of President Barack Obama and how to tackle efforts to fight terrorism. Israeli President Shimon Peres, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Pakistani Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani and the foreign ministers of Iran, Britain and France were slated to participate.
On Wednesday, the Chinese and Russian prime ministers obliquely criticized the United States for producing the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, citing a blinding drive for profit.
Both China's Wen Jiabao and Russia's Vladimir Putin said the crisis had seriously affected their countries' economies.
The annual meeting of politicians, top business leaders, activists and celebrities gathered under a pall of gloom that has seen personal fortunes trimmed, companies shuttered and hundreds of thousands jobs lost.
"There is a modesty, even a humility of confidence," Michael Useem, a management professor at The University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business, said of this year's conference.
The failure of the world's financial community and of regulators to detect and deflect the spiraling crisis has left many groping for answers and questioning what went wrong on a moral, even spiritual level.
"We have trusted the invisible hand so much that we forgot to bring virtue to bear on our decisions so the invisible hand has let go of some important things, like the common good," said theologian Jim Willis, CEO of Sojourners USA.
"The common good has not been very common in our decision making about economics for a long time," he said.
