Ministers to launch UK’S post-brexit economy plan
The government’s plan to boost UK industry ahead of the country leaving the EU is due to be launched later.
The industrial strategy is aimed at lifting growth, which official forecasts suggest will slow due to the UK’S poor productivity performance, BBC reported.
Business Secretary Greg Clark said the UK’S decision to leave the EU meant the strategy was ‘even more important’. A deal with US healthcare giant MSD to open a UK research center has been announced as part of the strategy.
Will the government’s economic medicine work?
The investment by MSD, known as Merck in the US, is worth up to £1 billion and is expected to create 950 jobs.
The government said the announcement was ‘a huge vote of confidence’ in its plans to boost the post-brexit UK economy.
The strategy comes just days after official forecasting body the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) announced an aggressive downgrade of its UK growth and productivity forecasts.
Political parties and business groups have said that the solution to creating stronger growth and higher wages is more investment.
The industrial strategy is expected to outline similar partnerships to the MSD one with other private sector firms in the construction, artificial intelligence and automotive sectors.
The deals will see the government pledge funding and policy collaboration in exchange for investment from private firms. The government said the deals would be ‘strategic and long-term partnerships’. It has already pledged to invest an additional £80 billion in research and development over the next decade.
The additional funding is aimed at putting the UK’S investment in this area on a par with other advanced nations.
Currently the UK spends 1.7 percent of its gross domestic product on research and development, much lower than the 2.4 percent average of developed countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Bitcoin surged to yet another new record high on Monday, breaking a record set during the Thanksgiving weekend stateside.
Bitcoin surged to yet another new record high on Monday, breaking a record set during the Thanksgiving weekend stateside, CNBC wrote.
The cryptocurrency jumped to an all-time high of $9,671.84 hours after cracking the $9,400 level on Sunday, according to industry site Coindesk. It later pared some gains to trade at $9,631.21 at 10:00 a.m. HK/ SIN, rising some 3.27 percent on the day.
Brian Kelly, a CNBC contributor and CEO of BKCM, which runs a digital assets strategy, said, “The move appears to be retail driven.”
The largest bitcoin exchange in the US, Coinbase, added about 100,000 accounts between Wednesday and Friday — just around Thursday’s Thanksgiving holiday — to a total of 13.1 million. That’s according to public data available on Coinbase’s website and historical records compiled by Alistair Milne, co-founder and chief investment officer of Altana Digital Currency Fund. Coinbase had about 4.9 million users last November, Milne’s data showed.
The surge in interest also comes on the back of CME’S announcement that it will list bitcoin futures in the second week of December. The launch of a derivatives product for the digital currency will mark another step in establishing bitcoin as a legitimate asset class.
Still, with the digital currency having risen by some 869 percent yearto-date, plenty have taken to pointing out the potential pitfalls of what they see as a price bubble.
Jpmorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon in October warned that those ‘stupid’ enough to buy bitcoin will ultimately ‘pay the price for it’. He added that he did not comprehend the value of currencies that were not backed by a government and that “[t]he only value of bitcoin is what the other guy’ll pay for it.”
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