It’s time for everyone to retire and leave the work to the robots. According to research by the BBC and Oxford University last year, 35% of jobs were at ‘high risk of computerisation’.  In the US, one study stated that could be as high as 45%. Robots are expensive in the short term, but run 24 hours a day. It won’t be long before they do everything and humans desire to work becomes redundant.

This comes after a few weeks of having countries (like France) setting up research programmes to discover a national weekly income in preparation for the robotic wave that will replace the human workforce. Trials of ‘Basic Income’ are going on in Finland, with potential further ones in the US, Holland, Spain and France. After a bit of light reading, it appears that ‘every experiment so far’ has provided positive feedback, evening improving short term economic performance. We’d love to have some more innovative companies come forward to help them finance their newest expansions and technologies, so come and get in touch and we’ll help you out!

In other news, there’s more trouble brewing for the European Union as the EU commission warned recently that France risked breaking the EU rules on deficit spending in 2018. Alongside the fact that anti-EU politicians are topping the French polls, promising to pull out of the Euro if they win is causing a stir in Brussels. Brexit has seemingly started building the EU bonfire and other countries only going to continue chopping down wood to add to it. It was also announced by the European Commission that the UK economy will ‘slow down sharply over the next couple of years’ while the 19 Eurozone countries will grow 0.3% then 0.6%  faster in 2017 and 2018 respectively. Let’s just all just pray that soon we’ll all be paid to do nothing by governments. (I’ll let them work out the logistics).

Over here in Derbyshire at BFS, last week ended with a couple of new clients wanting to upgrade their motors. It appears that more and more people are turning towards finance rather than paying cash upfront for everything. It’s good to see people stay confident, especially when the rates continue to be surprising attractive, completely against the trend of global finance meltdown.