Good morning. Andrew here. We’re here for the third day of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Breaking: A huge crowd of protesters has apparently descended upon the main street here ahead of President Trumps arrival at the forum. His long-awaited speech is expected to touch on Greenland, tariffs, housing and more. How will Trump be welcomed? Well, it’s complicated. Business leaders are hoping to see — and praise — him in person. But written into the snow at the top of a mountain, visible from town, is a giant “No Kings” sign. This morning I moderated a panel with Larry Fink of BlackRock, Christine Lagarde of the European Central Bank, Ken Griffin of Citadel and Adam Tooze, the Columbia historian. Trump’s trade war was a major point of discussion: Lagarde noted that the average tariffs on the eurozone are now around 12 percent, up from about 2 percent a year ago — and could hit 15 percent. Griffin added that levies were “regressive on the American consumer.” (Was this newsletter forwarded to you? Sign up here.)
What will he say?After days of saber-rattling, market turmoil and anxiety that have unnerved the political and business leaders gathered at the World Economic Forum, the man behind much of the upheaval — President Trump — is set to take the stage in Davos, Switzerland. European leaders are denouncing his efforts to acquire Greenland. Business leaders, however, remain pragmatic, as they have throughout his second term. The mind-set, one executive told Lauren Hirsch yesterday, is “adaptive normalcy.” When Trump speaks, after unexpected travel hitches, what will he say? And how will the world respond? The latest: European leaders continued to push back as Trump reinforced his designs on Greenland, even as it remains unclear how far he would go to take over the semiautonomous territory. (“You’ll find out,” he said cryptically yesterday.) So far, the E.U. has held off on imposing tariffs on U.S. goods, even as a long-negotiated Euro-American trade deal now appears at risk. Separately, Prime Minister Mark Carney of Canada drew a standing ovation yesterday in declaring a “rupture” to the world order, and urged medium-size countries to band together to offset the power of the U.S., China and Russia. NATO’s secretary general, Mark Rutte, said onstage that he was working behind the scenes to calm tensions, which threaten to tear apart the decades-old military alliance. “I can assure you, the only way to deal with that is, in the end, thoughtful diplomacy,” he said. Still, the Trump administration is focused on projecting strength. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told reporters today that everyone should “take a deep breath” for now. “Why don’t they sit down, wait for President Trump to get here and listen to his argument?” he said. “Because I think they’re going to be persuaded.” And on Greenland, Bessent said, “I think that we are asking our allies to understand that Greenland needs to be part of the United States.” Separately, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said onstage that “globalization has failed the West and the United States of America,” explicitly rebuking a core tenet of Davos. He instead defended the administration’s brusque “America First” approach — though a fellow panelist, the EY C.E.O. Janet Truncale, pushed back: “Globalization’s not going away,” she said. (Lutnick was later heckled at a private dinner hosted by Larry Fink of BlackRock, with some guests walking out, according to The Financial Times.) Davos attendees say that Greenland still dominates everything. Bankers told Hirsch that the first 20 minutes of nearly every conversation they have is about the island and what Trump’s offramp from the growing turmoil might be. The hope here is that the Greenland drama will end up like Trump’s tariffs: the initial disruption giving way to negotiations that the president can cast as a win.
Tech workers push companies to take a stand against ICE. Workers at Google, Amazon, TikTok and other businesses published a letter calling on their employers to “demand that ICE leave our cities” and cancel contracts with the agency. It’s one of the first signs of mass pushback by tech to President Trump in his second term. The F.T.C. plans to appeal its loss in the Meta antitrust case. The agency will seek to overturn a federal judge’s ruling that the tech giant had not broken antitrust laws by buying Instagram and WhatsApp. Separately, Snapchat avoided a landmark trial by settling a lawsuit that claimed the platform’s design and algorithm had led to addiction and mental health problems. Netflix’s revenue and costs rise, as it seeks to buy Warner Bros Discovery. The streaming giant reported quarterly revenue of about $12.1 billion, up 18 percent year-on-year, while it expects spending on films and TV shows to increase 10 percent this year. Netflix added it would pause stock buybacks to build up cash for the Warner Bros. Discovery deal; its shares are over 7 percent in premarket trading. Denmark’s sell America tradeGlobal markets are volatile again today, with S&P 500 futures slumping after yesterday’s swoon, the biggest since October. The “sell America” debate continues, too. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and top financiers like Ray Dalio and Sergio Ermotti of UBS have weighed in on a matter that has permeated discussions in Davos, Switzerland, and beyond. But while some Danish pension funds said they had begun dumping millions in U.S. government bonds, many Wall Street watchers said they didn’t expect anger toward Washington over Greenland and trade threats to set off a major sell-off of American financial assets. The latest: The dollar and U.S. Treasuries are under pressure again today after yesterday’s drastic slide, which was brought on by President Trump’s tariff threats against Europe and upheaval in Japan’s bond market. A bank research report became the subject of international intrigue. A note published on Sunday by George Saravelos, a global head of FX research at Deutsche Bank, suggested that European investors could play a role in any economic fight between the U.S. and the E.U. He wrote: The U.S. has one key weakness: it relies on others to pay its bills via large external deficits. Europe, on the other hand, is America’s largest lender: European countries own $8 trillion of U.S. bonds and equities, almost twice as much as the rest of the world combined. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent lashed out at the report today, suggesting that it was an outlier. Bessent added that “the C.E.O. of Deutsche Bank called to say that Deutsche Bank does not stand by that analyst report.” Hanswolf Hohn, a Deutsche Bank spokesman, declined to comment to Bernhard Warner on whether such a call took place. But he added that the bank’s research analysts are independent, and that their views “do not necessarily represent the view of the bank’s management.” Danish pension funds have entered the fray. AkademikerPension, which manages $25 billion in assets, said this week that it would sell its roughly $100 million holdings in U.S. Treasury notes and bonds by the end of the month. “We think basically the U.S. is a bad credit in the long term,” Anders Schelde, the fund’s chief investment officer, told DealBook. Another Danish pension fund, Paedagogernes Pension, told DealBook it had recently sold roughly $31 million worth of Treasury bonds and notes. That decision, too, was driven by financial analysis, said Johannes Bill Ladegaard, the fund’s chief investment officer. He told DealBook that Trump’s threats against Denmark over Greenland “have not, however, caused us to question our decision.” Tensions are high. Schelde said AkademikerPension could sell more U.S. financial assets “if the U.S. were to take Greenland by force.” (Jens-Frederik Nielsen, Greenland’s prime minister, told Greenlanders yesterday they should start preparing for a possible U.S. military invasion.) But Bessent appeared unconcerned: “The size of Denmark’s investment in U.S. Treasury bonds, like Denmark itself, is irrelevant,” he said.
What C.E.O.s want to hear from TrumpWhat will President Trump say in his speech at the World Economic Forum? That’s the guessing game that business leaders in Davos, Switzerland, have been playing in recent days, Jordyn Holman reports from the event. He’s expected to talk about tackling affordability in the U.S. and his proposed “Board of Peace.” But Greenland will almost certainly be a major subject, too. Still, C.E.O.s attending Davos are hoping that the president will take the temperature down a notch. Here’s what three executives told DealBook they’ll be listening for:
The drama at a promising A.I. upstartThe race to dominate artificial intelligence has set off a fierce and expensive battle for talent. That has sometimes led to very tense moments. What has the A.I. world buzzing these days is the upheaval at Thinking Machines Lab, the start-up Mira Murati, OpenAI’s former chief technology officer, helped found. The Wall Street Journal, citing unnamed sources, takes a look at what happened. It escalated last week with Murati expecting to have a one-on-one with Barret Zoph, a co-founder of Thinking Machines who had already drawn heat over having had a previously undisclosed relationship with a colleague and, according to Murati, a lack of productivity: She was invited instead to an impromptu meeting with Zoph, another co-founder and a third employee. The three told her they disagreed with the direction of the company and that they were considering leaving. They asked for Zoph to be given charge of all technical decision-making, according to the people. Murati responded that Zoph was already C.T.O. and asked why he hadn’t been doing his job for months, they said. Two days later, Zoph was fired. Within hours, all three had signed offers to rejoin OpenAI, the A.I. lab they had ditched a year ago to join Murati’s fledgling start-up. Zoph told The Journal that he had been working as an individual contributor, participated in several projects and was out of the office for some of late last year because of illness, a death in the family and the holidays. The departures, which came after the loss of another co-founder to Meta last fall, raise questions about the stability of Thinking Machines, which is reportedly pursuing a $50 billion valuation. More broadly, it may test investor appetite for betting on promising but volatile A.I. start-ups. We hope you’ve enjoyed this newsletter, which is made possible through subscriber support. Subscribe to The New York Times.
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