As the World Economic Forum got underway in Davos this week, the gap between “a spirit of dialogue” — the meeting’s official theme — and what will actually be named *out loud *was on full display. More than 60 heads of state are attending the annual gathering, alongside hundreds of business leaders. Those include Andy Jassy, the CEO of Amazon $AMZN, a company whose roughly $2.5 trillion market capitalization and $700 billion in annual revenue make it larger than most national economies.

Speaking to CNBC from Davos on Tuesday, Jassy offered a carefully phrased assessment of how President Donald Trump’s trade policy is already filtering through to consumers. Shoppers are still spending, he said, but they’re trading down, hunting for bargains, and “a little more hesitant on higher-priced discretionary items.” Amazon and its third-party sellers tried to get ahead of the problem by “pre-buying” inventory early in 2025, staging goods in advance to blunt the impact of Trump’s tariffs.

Even so, Jassy acknowledged that “you start to see some of the tariffs creep into some of the prices.”

CEOs’ sidelong commentary on economic policy

The pressure caused by tariffs is hard to absorb in a low-margin business like retail. “You don’t have endless options,” Jassy said, describing it as a structural challenge more than a temporary squeeze. In other words, tariffs aren’t an abstraction, but have the potential to affect prices on millions of items and to affect millions of sellers, too.

A few moments later, Jassy pointed to a longer-term shift looming over the labor market. While generative artificial intelligence hasn’t yet displaced workers “in a significant way,” he said it’s increasingly capable of handling coding, analytics, and customer service tasks — meaning fewer people may be needed for those roles in the years ahead.

“In the next couple of years, I could see us having fewer people than we had before” Jassy said. “Jobs are going to be impacted by what’s happening with AI over time.” This includes routine work and “thinking work.”

E.U. President speaks obliquely of U.S. shocks

If Jassy described the more immediate economic mechanics, Ursula von der Leyen sketched the broader stakes. In her Davos speech, the European Commission president invoked the “Nixon shock” of 1971, when the collapse of the Bretton-Woods system upended the postwar global order. That moment, she said, offered Europe a lesson in the dangers of over-dependence — one that she said now feels newly relevant, an implied reference to the White House’s present-day retreat from long-standing trade and diplomacy norms.

Last year, von der Leyen’s warnings were met with skepticism. But this year, she said, there’s been a shift, with “real consensus” emerging that Europe must reduce its dependencies and concentrate on its economic independence.

Instability as an economic input

Davos is often framed and reported upon as if it’s a source of fresh insight, when it really tends to be an event at which the status quo is articulated a little more candidly, if still politely. But that politeness feels more strained than ever.

The world’s most powerful executives are naming effects without naming causes, European leaders are anchoring their remarks in past shocks named after American presidents, and everyone is discussing systemic disruption as if it were weather, not the consequence of decisions and policy.

Disruption has always been part of economic change, and not all of it is destructive. But what’s surfacing in Davos seems to be widespread recognition that when disruption is driven by whims — rather than innovation or even necessity — it tends to raise prices, make political problems more difficult to solve, and narrow choices for market participants more generally.

Whatever the long-term outcomes, no one seems to be describing it as the kind of disruption that feels generative or productive.

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