Part of the resistance to JBS in America has come from the distinctively Brazilian way in which the firm is financed.

ECONOMIST: A Brazilian livestock firm has grown to prize-winning size

John Thornton of Austin Ventures, a local venture-capital firm, says his company financed as many Austin-based high-tech companies in 1996 as in the previous five years taken together.

ECONOMIST: Silicon Valley: Deep in the heart of Texas | The

The firm sees the two foreign-financed projects as test cases for others elsewhere in the North West.

ECONOMIST: Liverpool and China

Businesses participating in the zones may be paid fees for consultancy work but the teaching unions have wrung from ministers a promise that no firm will profit from providing state-financed teaching.

ECONOMIST: Schools

Just as the shapes and number of the pieces do not affect the size of the pizza, so the value of a firm should be unaffected by how it is financed.

ECONOMIST: Merton Miller

But in 1958 Franco Modigliani and Merton Miller, two American economists, showed that the value of a firm should be unaffected by whether it is financed using all debt, all equity, or a mix of the two.

ECONOMIST: Stocks in trade | The

Alarm bells started to ring at the firm's headquarters when a Cadbury-financed study by the University of Sussex and the University of Accra found that the average production of a cocoa farmer had dropped to 40% of potential yield, and that the children of cocoa farmers did not want to work in the family business any more.

ECONOMIST: Cadbury hopes to secure its cocoa supply with a new scheme

Perhaps the most striking thing about the emergence of Mr Guilloteau's firm, however, is the way it has been financed.

ECONOMIST: The money show

He and the firm created almost out of whole cloth the high yield bond market that financed so many cutting-edge corporate entities in the 1970s and 1980s.

FORBES: When looking a gift horse in the mouth, it's best to accurately count the teeth: Lowell Milken's Donation, and the Ignorant Condemnation That Followed