Each year in January, the World Economic Forum holds its annual conference in Davos, Switzerland. For three days, the über-elites of business and politics gather to discuss the state of the world and try to understand how the other half lives, while eating $43 hot dogs, guzzling champagne, and partying late into the night with a collection of people whose net worth exceeds the G.D.P. of many small and some medium-sized countries. This year, though, things are slightly different. For starters, the attendees have gone from merely filthy, stinking rich to making the filthy, stinking rich look poor. More important, the world’s gazillionaires are completely and totally freaked out about what’s to come.

On Monday, before the festivities kicked off, the International Monetary Fund slashed its forecast for global growth, and fear that central banks lack the adequate ammunition to fight a slump dominated day one of the conference. “What worries me most is if we were to run into a serious problem, a recession or something worse, we would have very limited firepower left to respond to it,” Philipp Hildebrand, vice chairman of BlackRock, told Bloomberg TV. His worry was echoed by hedge-fund manager Ray Dalio, who said during a panel that “what scares me the most longer term is that we have limitations to monetary policy—which is our most valuable tool—at the same as we have greater political and social antagonism. So, the next downturn in the economy worries me the most.”

Fear about global social tensions, combined with rising debt levels were the major themes of billionaire investor Seth Klarman’s annual letter, which was circulated among major policymakers and executives ahead of the conference. “It can’t be business as usual amid constant protests, riots, shutdowns and escalating social tensions,” Klarman wrote, saying that “Social cohesion is essential for those who have capital to invest.” Alarmingly, the hedge-fund manager noted that “the seeds of the next major financial crisis (or the one after that) may well be found in today’s sovereign debt levels,” with nearly every developed country in the world taking on massive amounts of debt since the 2008 crisis. Most worrisome to him is the debt load in the U.S. “There is no way to know how much debt is too much, but America will inevitably reach an inflection point whereupon a suddenly more skeptical debt market will refuse to continue to lend to us at rates we can afford,” he warned. “By the time such a crisis hits, it will likely be too late to get our house in order . . . It is not hard to imagine worsening social unrest among a generation that is falling behind economically and feels betrayed by a massive national debt that was incurred without any obvious benefit to them.”

Citing geopolitical events like the U.S.-China trade war and the complete and total clusterfuck that is Brexit, Martin Gilbert, co-C.E.O. of Standard Life Aberdeen, told CNBC that we are “certainly . . . in a worse place than we were a year ago,” predicting that the global economy could face even more trouble. “Even though the economists say global growth will be OK next year, the stock markets are telling us something completely different,” he said. “They are usually a very good forward-looking indicator and they are saying there is a bit of trouble ahead.”

Of course, the most terrifying thing on everyone’s mind was the orange elephant not in the room.