Events are moving too fast for the organizers of the annual World Economic Forum, which opens in Davos on Thursday. The main topic on the agenda at the Swiss resort is a discussion on “Defining Innovation,” where a former British prime minister, Tony Blair, will encourage Bill Gates, Henry Kissinger, and others to predict where the next wave of technological change will lead the world’s markets.

But the real world has a nasty way of intervening even into this rich man’s networking playground, set high in the Alps. Davos 2008 is certain to be dominated by a more pressing topic than innovation: whether the worldwide financial instability prompted by the lax setting of interest rates, which led to the subprime mortgage crisis and a housing price bubble, is fast leading America and the world economy into recession.

The Davos founder, Klaus Schwab, is aware that the official agenda has become notional. “The discussions in Davos will certainly be very dominated by the economic challenges we have at the moment: the aftermath of the subprime crisis, the transfer of capital from energy-consuming to energy-producing countries, inflationary tendencies,” he told the Financial Times.

The pressing debate on how or whether it is possible to prevent the world tipping into recession, which will take place in and around the 235 official conference set pieces, will be colored by some smugness, tinged with concern, on behalf of the Europeans.

Last January’s Davos meeting attracted a large number of American hedge fund managers and top bankers who lectured nervous Europeans that instead of imposing regulations on private equity, hedge funds, and credit markets in general, the free market would find its own remedies to the boom in lending.

The market did indeed work its magic. This year 27 heads of state, 113 cabinet ministers, and more than 1,000 CEOs of the world’s biggest companies find themselves without the company of some of the most persuasive American voices who urged the Europeans to stop worrying, relax, and enjoy the results of cheap money.

For the first time in many years, a former chairman and chief executive of Citigroup, the affable Charles Prince, will be absent from the slopes, as will Merrill Lynch’s Stanley O’Neal and James Cayne of Bear Stearns. Paul Wolfowitz, formerly of the World Bank, also will miss Davos’s legendary après piste.

Those fixtures on the recent Davos scene have been replaced by a new banking order, among them the chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase, James Dimon, and the chairman and CEO of Goldman Sachs, Lloyd Blankfein.

The Europeans, led by Jean-Claude Trichet of the European Central Bank, with the architect of Britain’s economic resurgence, Prime Minister Brown, on hand, will be debating to what extent the economy of Britain and the rest of the European Union has become detached from America’s fate. If Americans stop spending, how long can Europeans remain buoyant?

Also present, and in unprecedented numbers, will be the absent bankers’ nemeses, the leaders of the many sovereign wealth funds from Arab and Asian nations who have stepped in with billions of dollars to bail out America’s faltering banks, including Citibank and Merrill Lynch. Thursday’s session on “Myths and Realities of Sovereign Wealth Funds” is sure to be well-attended.

There are other close encounters worth observing. For the first time, Israeli and Palestinian Arab leaders will be in attendance. Davos is famous for encouraging informal meetings over breakfasts and dinners to confront intractable problems, though a peace deal in the Middle East and a solution to the genocide in Darfur, which is on the official agenda, seem well beyond reach.

But Davos is not just heavy-duty discussions about curing the problems of the world. This year the American cellist Yo-Yo Ma and the German filmmaker Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, whose movie “The Lives of Others” depicted how East Germany’s police state spied on the model communist society’s subjects, will also attend. And for the totally frivolous, the organizers have planned a special event, “Happiness — How Much Can You Take?”