Black Friday is not another bad hair day in Wall Street. It's the term used by American retailers to describe the day after the Thanksgiving Holiday, seen as the semi-official start of Christmas shopping season.

Someday we'll look back on this moment and plow into a parked car.

But beginners to the World Economics Forum have to understand there is no single Davos experience, and there is no single Davos community either. There are numerous tribes who interact only at a minimal level.

Black Friday is not another bad hair day in Wall Street. It's the term used by American retailers to describe the day after the Thanksgiving Holiday, seen as the semi-official start of Christmas shopping season.

We all know that Americans love their statistics - in sport, obviously. And in finance too.

It's amazing, if you know what you want to say, how fast it is to write.

Britain, however, has ended up specializing in the ones you don't see as much of: defense aerospace, making drive shafts for cars, pills and drugs, designing chips that go into 94 percent of the world's mobile phones.

I've always been scared of advertising folk. I've met them at parties and I've been to their offices and I've always found them intimidatingly cool. At one company I visited, they held their meetings in a caravan that had somehow been installed in the place, a rather more exotic place to gather than the typical BBC glass box.