Geo-political news
COVID-19 – The UK is said to be looking to ease certain lockdown measures this coming Monday, which includes the government are drawing up guidance for employers on how they should approach returning to
work. This comes as poor economic data continues to surface amongst European countries. The Centre for Economics and Business Research carried out a survey in the UK, finding that 10% of businesses were at
high risk of becoming insolvent due to economic disruption. However, more than three quatres of all UK businesses continued to trade last month, suggesting that the UK workforce are able to withstand the economic fallout from this pandemic. UK investors are awaiting the Bank of England policy update that will be announced today. European Union growth forecasts predicted the Eurozone is to contract by 7.7% in 2020, inflation to slow to 0.2% and the aggregate budget deficit to hit 8.5%. Italy, Greece, Spain and
Portugal are expected to be among the hardest hit.
In the US, the Federal Emergency Management Agency predicts both fatality and infected figures will experience big rises in the coming weeks. They stated the death toll will rise to 3,000 a day with new infections reach 200,000 a day by June 1st. While this is only one of a large number of studies being taken into consideration by the federal government, the number of studies that have highlighted the risks to the US surrounding opening the economy too early cannot be ignored. Data published this Wednesday highlighted that private payrolls had fallen by a record 20.2 million in April, which was a contributing factor to the historic job loss figures published at the end of last month.
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