– U.S. Sen. Claire McCaskill has returned to Washington after spending last week with the world’s leading figures in business and politics in Davos, Switzerland for the World Economic Forum.
McCaskill, a member of the Senate Commerce Committee, was invited to attend the annual gathering as part of a congressional delegation including Republican U.S. Senators John McCain and Rob Portman, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa, and Rep. Jeb Hensarling.
During her trip, McCaskill met directly with Carlo Brito, CEO of Anheuser-Busch InBev (with whom she scheduled a meeting later this year in St. Louis), Paul Bulcke, CEO of Nestle (which has its Purina operation based in St. Louis,) and Stephen Wilson, Chairman of CF Industries.
“All those CEO’s I’ve had a chance to talk to about their businesses and the outlooks for next year and how Missouri figures in that equation,” McCaskill said. “The news was good. Both executives felt very strangle about how well the parts of their companies that are in St. Louis are doing. Both were bullish on St. Louis and complimentary.”
The overarching focus of the conference was on the issues surrounding income inequality. McCaskill said the question of whether mandatory wages and collective bargaining should be essential ingredients to successful economies was a major focus. McCaskill said one of the things that came up was the idea that with lower wages, America has become more competitive worldwide in terms of production, but the “ability of our economy to do as good as it has” has been reduced.
Still, McCaskill said America’s approach to the recession has left the economy better off here than the austerity approach taken by the Europeans.
“The strict austerity hasn’t been as helpful,” she said.
McCaskill said her takeaway was that the economy is gaining some footing following the recession, that “it is safer, but it is not safe enough.”
“We still have a lot of these CEO’s that are on the books with some of those exotic trades that are still going on that are not as transparent as they should be. We have to strive for more transparency,” she said. “It’s not that we have to prohibit people from using these financial instruments, we just have to make sure there’s enough of a margin of risk.”
McCaskill contributed to a panel on technology and the automotive industry, her office said. She also participated in briefings with other world business and political leaders. Secretary of State John Kerry and Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker were also in attendance.
McCaskill said she had one meeting that covered the issues in the Middle East surrounding Syria, where she met with the top diplomatic officials from Turkey, Iran, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia.
“To have the key people in the room talking about what is occurring and watching and listening, and sometimes contributing, as to how we go about solving this incredible crisis in Syria where you are really risking the entire take down of a country,” she said. “The number of people who are in desperate need of humanitarian aid has gone from 1 million to close to 9 million How we get that humanitarian aid for them in the current political environment?