Research of general world markets & events

Question 1

How many banks have been sanctioned by Uk to Russia?

Answer 1

5 banks, 3 people with cross-party demands for more/
banks: Rossiya, IS Bank, General Bank, Promsvyazbank, and the Black Sea Bank.
Sanctions for those financing the military deployment of troops
Meanwhile, Germany pulls plug on Nord Stream 2 pipeline
Russia was the UK’s 19th largest trading partner in the four quarters to the end of Q3 2021
accounting for 1.3% of total UK trade.1
Mainly threatens fuels e.g. gas, not a huge global contender aside from this but worth considering alongside cost of living crisis

Question 2

Argument over integrity with pelaton.(1)

Answer 2

Plans to cover up rust in bikes rather than be open and recall.

Question 3

Metaverse employment laws.(1)

Answer 3

The physical world of work is regulated by national legal frameworks. In California, for example, workers can be fired with no notice, while in Holland, employees generally cannot be sacked without approval from the court or Dutch employment agency. In the metaverse, however, the national employment law that applies is not immediately obvious.
Worker participation in the metaverse also raises important questions about privacy and data security, given the scale of personal data that companies such as Meta expect to gather and monetise.-selling to create more targeted ads

Question 4

Will tech replace accountants?.(1)

Answer 4

Varonis can scan lots of data in documents in minutes, OCR (optical character recognition) can read invoices can save hours uses machine learning too so improves with practise
Better at critical data analysis eg. alterix can give a sampling populatoin based on risk criteria we provide. RPA power automate by microsoft remove admin tasks,
remove bias, haphazard sample selection invoice entry
BUT doesnt have the same ingenuity as humans, can’t go to meetings a lot more to auditing than just number crunching-excel been around for a while and that has only improved lives for accountants, not replaced them
-UNLIKELY

Question 5

Impact of Brexit on UK trade and business.(4)

Answer 5

-Most trade with non-EU countries with just over half some sources say now-China being the largest
-Small businesses mainly effected by this and covid
-Manufacturing industry had to cut jobs and close plants in uk, also Panasonic and sony moving hq to amsterdam
JPmorgan, goldman sachs natwest etc moved employees from london to eu cities e.g. paris, dublin
-HGV driver issues not that long ago, cbi lowest stock levels

Question 6

Impact of COVID on UK trade and business.(1)

Answer 6

Covid-19 (Covid) caused a significant decline in global trade in 2020, particularly in services trade. … First, the pandemic affected services trade more than goods trade. Services trade fell by more than 20% in 2020, almost four times the decline in goods trade (Chart A).

Question 7

Cost of living crisis.(2)

Answer 7

• High inflation (5.4% 30 year high), increased gas prices, high tax burden (H&S care highest since 1960s)
• Mainly hits low and middle class, typically employees (if wages aren’t increasing which is suggestable) and pensioners, wellfare state gaps also to blame