Economic news took centre stage this week it seemed…
The UK has reportedly plunged into the deepest recession on record shrinking 20%. This is more than our peers in Europe and already impacting jobs, with redundancies up 5 fold from normal.
There is an expectation that this will increase further once the furlough scheme ends… the end of the summer when reality hits, is likely to be somewhat grim. Interestingly, over in the US, Jamie Dimon of JP Morgan is expecting the full effects to get delayed until the end of the year, so we may have a little more time.
UK consumers are clearly reigning in their expenditure already. They are now borrowing less and using spare cash saved through the lockdown to pay down debt. This is resulting in a contraction of lending market for now at least.
On the fin-tech front more news of financial pressure, with Revolut losses seeing a further increase (x3). As discussed before, this does seem like a sector under challenge especially given the current environment… all the normal economic rules (and stability) are being changed as they are growing… maybe they are just ahead and their time will arrive (remember the dot.com bubble, crash and then real growth of hugely successful companies like Amazon)… this is one to watch closely.
Lastly, there were also a couple of interesting stories on working from home
- The rise of fake office background noise – to make you feel like you are in the office… not sure on this one
- Also an article on the importance to health of those little daily social interactions that we are all missing at the moment.
Have a good weekend everyone…. @chris_w_tweet
