Business & Finance

Conferences have become fixtures of the social calendar because the same people attend them: Davos in January, the Milken conference in Beverly Hills in May, Cannes Lions in June, the Allen & Company gathering in Sun Valley in July, SuperReturn in Berlin, the UN General Assembly's high-level week in September, the Future Investment Initiative in Riyadh in October, CES in Las Vegas in January. Each takes over a town or a district for its week; Davos is the clearest case, a small resort turned into the world's most concentrated meeting for five days. These weeks are worth reading as calendar events rather than as conferences. They set hotel rates in their cities, they pull private aircraft into airports that are otherwise quiet, and they fix the dates other things arrange themselves around: the UN's high-level week is why late September in New York is impossible to book, and Davos is why the Alps have a business season inside the ski season. Attendance is by invitation or by paid delegate pass and the published programmes are usually open to read, which is the honest way to follow one from outside.