Twenty-seven heads of state and government, about a thousand chiefs of the world's most important business enterprises, and a smattering of stars and famous do-gooders have gathered in the small Swiss ski resort of Davos to network, exchange ideas and make deals. Since the 1970s, the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum has been the club of clubs, the place where the elite meet because everybody else who counts is there.

I attended it for two decades and found it a useful barometer of business and government sentiment, but no Davos meeting has ever been timelier than this one. In the winter of 2002 they met in New York City as a gesture of solidarity with America, but that was more than four months after the attacks of 9/11. This time the leaders of the worlds of business and government have gathered while an acute banking and financial crisis is still unfolding with consequences that are hard to predict. They are meeting on a mountain in a fog of uncertainty.

One of the themes of the World Economic Forum in recent years has been corporate responsibility -- in “Davos-speak” that means companies should do something to improve their communities and the world, and be motivated by more than just greed. Judging from comments by Davos bloggers this week, the business world is fully aware of what caused this crisis. The owner of a French multinational notes that “bankers are paying a high price for their greed – the lure of a fat bonus made them forget the risks.” Although many of the bankers at Davos are putting a brave face on a dicey situation, the French businessman believes there are still more skeletons in the closet, and that the crisis is likely to get worse. (He was speaking, by the way, the day before one of France's most important banks, the Société Générale, admitted that one of its employees had lost more than $ 7 billion in fraudulent trading.) The consensus view at Davos seems to be that the crisis is likely to get worse.

The questions being debated in the corridors at Davos and in the halls of governments and the boardrooms of the corporate world are whether the world is headed for an economic slowdown, and what to do. Some experts think the United States is already in the early stages of a recession, and that it is likely to spread to Europe and Asia. The idea that the rest of the world is somehow “decoupled” from the American economy has suddenly gone out of fashion. The world's stock markets seem to think so. Fear has replaced greed in the trading rooms of Paris, Frankfurt and London, as well as in New York.

Governments, however, do not agree on what to do. The American answer is to slash interest rates and hand out cash to consumers. The British and Europeans prefer more modest interest rate cuts and worry that a sudden infusion of money into their economies could stoke inflation. There is concern that America is trying to use easy money to cure a crisis that was caused by ... easy money.

Most Americans living today have never experienced a full-blown recession of the kind America knew in the 1930s. It was so bad we called it the Great Depression. That type of economic collapse is hard to imagine today. It was not just the poor and blue collar workers who suffered. Many middle class families lost their jobs and their homes. Those were really hard times.

Since then, advanced industrial societies have created a panoply of safeguards to protect the public: bank deposit insurance, unemployment insurance, social security and all the rest. But when the underpinnings of the American economy – the housing market, the credit market and consumer confidence – begin to collapse in the way we are now seeing, then the world may be entering new territory, and yesterday's solutions may not be enough for today's problems. We simply don't know at this point.

Let's hope that those titans of industry who are meeting in Davos can see things more clearly from the Swiss mountains. And perhaps come up with a few answers.