George Soros, the billionaire investor, today accused central banks of losing control of the economy following the Federal Reserve emergency rate cut.

The investor, who almost single-handedly drove the pound out of the European exchange-rate mechanism on Black Wednesday, also said that a recession was almost inevitable, telling BBC’s Today programme, “I think it will be very difficult to avoid it.”

Mr Soros, who was speaking from the World Economic Forum in Davos, said: “Central banks have lost control,” adding his voice to a number of other business leaders with the same view.

John Studzinski, head of Blackstone, the private equity giant, said: “The thing that markets are desperate for right now is leadership, whether globally or regionally, and it seems this is lacking.”

While Stephen Roach, head of Asia at Morgan Stanley, the US investment bank, said: “I’m sort of worried that all they did yesterday was to hit the snooze button.

“(This is) excessive monetary accommodation that just takes us from bubble to bubble to bubble.”

Commenting on the global economy, Mr Soros said: “I think we do have to rescue markets, otherwise we would go into a depression like we did in the 1930s.

But he added: “The authorities came to rely on the markets to right themselves. They ought to have known better, because they have in the past come to the rescue, so they ought to have known that the markets don’t necessarily right themselves.”

Other business leaders argued that the fears of a global economic slowdown were either overdone or would not seriously slow their own firms.

Indra Nooyi, the chief executive of PepsiCo, said, “In many ways we are countercyclical and it helps us either way, whether the market is up or down.”

Ms Nooyi said that rising commodity prices were a challenge but the fizzy drinks and food group had the levers to overcome the challenge.

She said: “How do we intelligently navigate through this? Through a mix of productivity, pricing and intelligent procurement ...While we are concerned about commodity inflation, we feel pretty comfortable that we will find a way through it.”

Louis D’Ambrosio, the chief executive of the US communications equipment company Avaya, said of the economic situation: “I do not think it is as bad as some make it out to be ... For example, we are not seeing a dramatic change in capital spending right now in the US.

"Clearly, it’s most pronounced in the banking area ... but if you look more broadly, globally ... you are not seeing the same impact people are writing about."

Martin Sorrell, the chief executive of UK advertising agency group WPP, was also sanguine.

He said: “We remain of the view that 2008 will not be the toughest year. It will probably be as good as 2007 or maybe even better. The real issue will be in ’09.”

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