Your Monday morning coffee briefing from TFG. Concern continued to grow over new variants of COVID-19. The UK has closed all travel corridors as of this morning. The UK economy shrank by 2.6% in November as lockdowns hit activity in the service sectors.
Almost four years later, Brexit is complete. What does the new UK and the EU agreement now mean for trade, and what’s left to do?
A commentary and foreword by ICC’s Secretary General John W.H. Denton AO and WTO’s Deputy Director-General Xiaozhun Yi, following the launch of WTO and TFG’s 2020 Blockchain for Trade publication.
A recent 2020 study and supplementary Covid-19 survey by TFG and WTO reveals the biggest challenges facing DLT trade-related firms when it comes to implementation of their solutions within corporates and banks.
Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT), colloquially termed ‘blockchain’ has been touted to disrupt trade and supply chain, as well it’s financing, for over 5 years. Following on from TFG, WTO and ICC’s ‘Periodic Table’ enlisting 39 projects in global trade utilising DLT, we’ve relaunched our table, indicating that the industry has considerably matured and evolved in less than 12 months.
Your Monday morning coffee briefing from TFG. The pandemic has created a vast natural experiment in home working.
Your Monday morning coffee briefing from TFG. Governments across Europe face a hard balance between public health and economic activity as they combat a resurgence in COVID-19 cases. Global trade is recovering more quickly than after the 2008 global financial crisis.
The transmission of COVID-19 has returned to “alarming rates” across Europe, says the World Health Organization. The UK government imposed more restrictions on areas of the North East and the Midlands to combat a rise in the number of cases.
The pandemic has been vastly disruptive. It has prompted powerful responses from the government and the private sector. The number of new cases globally appears to have stabilised. Lockdown measures early in the quarter weighed heavily on UK growth but the recovery picked up some pace in June, with GDP rising 8.7% from May.
In the UK Boris Johnson announced a further loosening of lockdown restrictions, reopening most remaining leisure facilities and dropping advice that public transport should be used for essential journeys only.
Only through collaboration and interoperability with other key technologies like AI, RPA, and the IoT will the path of consortia be effective in making trade finance truly digital.
The number of recorded daily new COVID-19 cases worldwide hit a new record last week with Latin America and the Caribbean now accounting for the largest number of cases by major region.
As Brexit starts to make its way back to the front pages, the tensions in the negotiations to date and the significant gaps between the parties have been laid bare.
As the lockdown eases the global economy is starting to come back to life. The UK started to emerge from lockdown, with people who are unable to work at home ‘actively encouraged’ to return to work. From next Monday all non-essential shops will be allowed to get back to business.
