When David Cameron flew to Davos last week to tell companies that reduce their tax bills by dividing activities among countries to “wake up and smell the coffee”, his target was clear. Starbucks now faces a consumer boycott and has been publicly accused of acting unethically. Read more

Andrew Hill

Horsemeat scandal leaves severe cracks in Tesco's reputation. Getty Images

Tesco has defined the limit of mutual responsibility for supply chains. Having inquired into the provenance of beefburgers that contained horsemeat, it has dumped Silvercrest, its supplier of frozen burgers, essentially for deviating from the list of Tesco-approved meat suppliers.

“The breach of trust is simply too great,” said Tim Smith, the UK retailer’s technical director, in a statement. (The owner and founder of Silvercrest’s parent told the FT earlier this month it had been “let down” by its own suppliers.) Read more

Andrew Hill

Getty Images

A merger between Anglo American and Xstrata falls into the “what if?” category of corporate counterfactuals. Anglo rebuffed Xstrata’s 2009 approach and the latter is now itself in the waiting room for a takeover from its largest shareholder Glencore.

But as Xstrata’s boss Mick Davis told me and Helen Thomas last week, he still feels he could have applied some merger-magic to Anglo, which on Tuesday confirmed speculation that it would write down the value of its Minas-Rio Brazilian iron ore project. Mr Davis said he had “absolutely no doubt” that he would have been able to liberate a more entrepreneurial culture at Anglo, by devolving more responsibility to operational managers, as at Xstrata. Here are his comments in full: Read more

Romantics searching for a business model to lead the financial sector out of post-crisis limbo keep flirting with the idea of partnership. Read more

John Gapper

Everyone you meet at Davos tends to ask you what are the things that have most struck you about the week. If, as David Rothkopf remarks, the World Economic Forum is “a factory where the conventional wisdom is manufactured”, that is how it is done.

So, in that spirit, here is my biggest “takeaway”: it is quite possible to have a useful meeting in 15 minutes. Read more

John Gapper

Will the rise of higher education in the US and elsewhere be curtailed by the expansion of Massive Open Online Courses (Moocs) that allow people to study digitally rather than attend lectures and classes? Some surprising people think so.

One of them is Rafael Reif, president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He told a panel in Davos organised by the Victor Pinchuk Foundation, that he didn’t think institutions such as MIT could keep charging $40,000 a year for tuition in the digital world. Read more

Greetings from Davos, the annual shindig of world leaders and chief executives in a valley by a Swiss mountain. Or perhaps the site of a global conspiracy of the power elite. Or perhaps the place where a Swiss professor imposes his quaint euro-views on “stakeholder capitalism” on US corporations. Or perhaps one giant cocktail party. Read more

John Gapper

My first task at Davos this year was a fun one: to interview Daniel Kahneman, the Nobel prize-winner and author of the best-selling book on the psychology of decision-making, Thinking, Fast and Slow.

One of the thoughts Mr Kahneman mooted in a lively hour of presentation and discussion was that chief executives, who are naturally optimistic people (for they would not be in that position if they weren’t), hold two sets of expectations in their heads. Read more