This year it took 900 Swiss policemen and countless rolls of barbed wire to keep protesters at bay. But once again, about 2,500 business, government and academic leaders gathered in this Alpine resort for the annual World Economic Forum, an officially non-profit organisation which gently strokes their egos and taps their wallets while making them feel quite pleased about letting it happen.
The attendees' declared mission: to ponder the global fate and find ways of making it better. The real goals for many: to network with useful contacts and discover what they should worry about in the year ahead.
Conference topics ranged from clinical depression to outer space. But there was much more concern about the United States. With its untested new administration and a faltering economy, the US struck many as a nation which might bring them unwanted trouble in the coming months.
That is because European, Japanese and Chinese participants all agreed the world had found no substitute as its main engine of growth. So if the US economy turned sour, the others cannot help but follow to an uncomfortable degree.
They probably went home with a sense of relief. Two clear messages emerged from conference talk: the George W. Bush administration will be more competent and less reckless than many had feared, while the US economy should be growing again quite nicely by the time the year comes to a close, even if the next six months are a bit tough.
'I have long felt the US needed to correct some internal and external imbalances,' said Laurent Fabius, French finance minister, 'but we do not have to be pessimistic [about the outlook] and I am not'.