DAVOS: The workmen are dismantling the partitioning in the Kongresszentrum, the “masters of the universe” are midway through their slap-up lunch on the Schatzalp mountain (no journalists allowed), and the final plenary sessions have been brought to a close. Davos is over for another year.

DAVOS: There are some people who come to Davos every year at the time of the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting — and never set foot inside the Kongresszentrum where all the big official WEF events take place.

There are always a few moans and groans about aspects of organization at the World Economic Forum in Davos — traffic in the small town, the availability of transport from neighboring places like Klosters (where yours truly usually chooses to stay), and general complaints about logistics.

DAVOS: Somewhere between the small industrial town of Landquart in eastern Switzerland and the world-renowned resort of Davos near the Austrian border, the climate and countryside changes — or at least it has done at every Davos I’ve attended since 2012.

According to reports, US President Joe Biden last week hastily rewrote parts of his State of the Union address to take account of events in Ukraine following the Russian invasion.

A health expert with a smattering of classical education recently quipped: “It’s a long way from omicron to omega.” She was talking about the likelihood that the omicron variant of the coronavirus would be its last serious manifestation.

The specter of inflation is once more looming over the global economy. The prospect of sharply rising prices of goods and services threatens to throw out the careful calculations of economic policymakers and make recovery from the pandemic recession more unpredictable and hazardous.

Many people, myself included, do not like tax. In fact, for many foreign workers in the Gulf region, that dislike is one of the big reasons we are here in the first place.