Attended by prominent figures such as tech billionaire Michael Dell, Blackstone chief Stephen Schwarzman and Yasir Al-Rumayyan, the head of Saudi Arabia’s $925bn Public Investment Fund, the FII Priority conference in Miami in February was one of the most high-profile business events in the US this year.
The first morning audience listened to former US secretary of state Mike Pompeo who warned the investors that it had become “impossible to separate geopolitical risk from capital allocation”.
A week later, at another event down the street in Miami, former Trump White House chief of staff Reince Priebus was the keynote speaker at JPMorgan’s flagship event for high-yield bond dealmakers. When the futures and derivatives industry convened up the coast in Boca Raton the following month, a prominent historian was brought in to lecture attendees on the “era of rising political turbulence”.