Delegates at this year's Davos shindig have been struggling to focus on the corporate champagne parties and late night rendezvous at the Hotel Europe piano bar.
It is hard to relax into white collar hedonism when so many of the world's conflicts are rattling the windows of the hotels and restaurants like poison-tipped hailstones.
By Europe Editor Tony Connelly
Just down the road in Montreux on Wednesday the Syrian government and opposition representatives faced off amid a blizzard of recrimination and hostility.
Some of the actors involved there, and in the Geneva II talks proper, were back and forward to Davos by helicopter.
When Ukrainian Prime Minister Mykola Azarov turned up in the Swiss ski resort as an invited guest, he discovered his invitation had been promptly binned because of the death and mayhem on Kiev's streets. As a result, he remained holed up in the Hotel National where he received precious few guests save a number of industrialists.
The focus also shifted from the world economy to the weightiest geopolitical dilemmas of the day, when Iranian President Hassan Rouhani swept into the Congress Hall in clerical robes and turban.
His presence alone was seen as another irresistible milestone in the sudden re-engagement between Tehran and the West, yet when it came to Syria, his pronouncements were a sharp reminder of the gulf that exists between Iran's worldview and that of the West.
Lamenting the "millions" of Syrians who have died as a result of "foreign terrorists", President Rouhani railed against outside intervention in the civil war.
This brought a withering response in a panel discussion some four hours later from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who gasped: "They oppose intervention in Syria? Iran IS intervening in Syria, Iran with the Revolutionary Guards on the ground in Syria is facilitating the mass slaughter [of civilians]..."
Any hopes that the presence of both the Israeli leader and the Iranian president in the same Congress Hall might lead to a discreet, yet historic, encounter came to nought.
When President Rouhani was asked on stage if Iran sought peaceful relations with all countries (as he appeared to be suggested), he replied with a wry smile that he was referring to all countries Iran recognised.
The nuance was clear: Iran does not recognise the State of Israel.
The closest we got to a rapprochement was the picture, snapped by an AP photographer, of the Iranian and Israeli aircraft that appeared to have been parked adjacent to each other on the stands at Zurich airport.
A mood of despair about the Middle East and its problems, therefore, has hung over Davos like an early morning mist.
Panel after panel has agonised over the destruction and bloodletting in Syria, the plight of civilians and the desperation of refugees, yet there have been precious few overtures or diplomatic brainwaves other than the usual actors restating well-entrenched positions.
Even President Rouhani could not find within his reset with the West over the nuclear issue the slightest chink to distance himself from the Assad regime, despite the publication on the eve of Davos of a report documenting the alleged murder and torture of 11,000 detainees in state-run prisons.
But Davos is about business above all, and both Israel and Iran pitched a message of innovation and economic revival above and beyond the debris of regional chaos. Prime Minister Netanyahu spoke of co-operation between Israeli and Palestinian entrepreneurs and boasted that Israel was the hi-tech hub of the Middle East, and the world's leading recycler of water.
President Rouhani said he wanted Iran to become one of the top ten global economies within three decades, and he saw his country's economic development as a key strategic aim of Iran's recalibrated foreign policy.
Indeed, he and his oil minister held a closed-door lunch with the representatives of European big oil - ENI, Total, BP and others. Iran wants to negotiate a new model of oil contracts with western companies by September to boost investment and to avail of new technologies for its ageing oil infrastructure.
Elsewhere, the mood over the global economy at least provided some respite from the problems of Egypt, Ukraine, Syria and the wider Middle East.
Analysts have seized on a clutch of recent economic data showing a US-led global recovery getting into gear, with Europe showing signs of real recovery, even if unemployment - especially youth unemployment - remains unacceptably high.
Notwithstanding worries about deflation and how the US Federal Reserve's stimulus programme will be phased out, in such a climate Taoiseach Enda Kenny has been lavished with praise for Ireland's performance in exiting the bailout and restoring its credit rating, as registered in the Moody's upgrade on the eve of the gathering.
Speaking in Davos Sheryl Sandberg, the chief operating officer for Facebook, described Mr Kenny as "a brilliant leader of a brilliant country".
But it has been a tricky line for the Government to walk: Few will forget Enda Kenny's first ill-starred visit to Davos and his remarks about the Irish people "going mad borrowing" when he was asked to explain the roots of Ireland's economic collapse.
Two years later the Taoiseach - and Minister for Finance Michael Noonan - have been ultra careful in Davos to insist that there is no complacency or triumphalism. The mantra has been that Ireland is sticking doggedly to its twin strategy of exiting the bailout and following its own medium-term economic plan.
For the moment international sentiment suggests that strategy is working, even if in unemployment black spots it doesn't feel like it, and even if there are genuine misgivings about the size of Ireland's public debt, at 124% of GDP, and how it will drag on the public finances for years.
In other ways Davos is changing its complexion. The numbers of celebrities has steadily fallen as their handlers have become fed up with their presence simply providing fodder for the glossies.
Also, Davos as a place of conflict between the occupy movement and the so-called one-percent is receding into the past. A security cordon circling the Alpine village has long deterred any determined protest or confrontation.
Klaus Schwab, the founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum, has always prided himself on a pluralist blend of the corporate, the governmental and the activist, but the event now has a slicker feel to it, if not exactly sanitised.
There is also more of a frisson around the appearance of Silicon Valley start-up whizz kids, even as the tech behemoths like Apple, Facebook and Google are in the spotlight more over taxation issues than over their life-transforming innovations.
But despite this, and despite the growing numbers of delegates and journalists from the developing world, Davos remains skewed in favour of the white, male, wealthy elite.
According to an intriguing infographic by the Economist, of 2,622 delegates only 15% are female, two thirds come from western countries, heads of state and government present represent 1.8 billion of the world's 7.1 billion population, while the stock market valuation of the companies present in Davos are worth $12 trillion.
