Today’s post takes a look at the forthcoming trip of Britain’s International Trade Secretary, Liam Fox, to the United States to begin talks about a possible trade deal between the two countries. In the media on both sides of the Atlantic, but particularly in the U.K., there is a real concern about the effects that such a trade deal could generate, with an imbalance between British and American corporations being top of that agenda. So, in this post, we will assess these claims and examine whether a trade deal is being pursued for the right reasons, or whether the pre-Brexit environment is already becoming illustrative of life outside of the European Union for the British. Speaking in July, President Trump said he expects a ‘powerful’ trade deal to be conducted with the U.K. ‘ very quickly ’, and it is on the back of these statements that Liam Fox has travelled to Washington, D.C. The talks themselves, which the head of the TUC – Frances O’Grady - suggests is a ‘ PR stunt ’ for F...

Today’s very short post reacts to a recent article in Reuters that discussed how some of the leading business schools across the United States are starting to embrace the demand to provide so-called ‘FinTech’ related course (‘FinTech’ being the amalgamation of Financial Technology, which covers a range of technologies). For this post, we will discuss how that demand is being met in a very varied way in terms of the ideology of FinTech, and also the importance of which ideology is championed by academia with regards to the wider effect of FinTech being used to facilitate predatory finance rather than, say, financial inclusion which is something discussed before here in Financial Regulation Matters ; the role of academia, in this sense, is absolutely vital in determining the size of the next financial bubble. Crudely, ‘FinTech’ can be understood as any technological innovation within the financial sector , which may apply to increasing financial literacy or to facilitating the de...