After a brutal first six months of the year, governments across the world are hoping for an economic bounce-back. Rich-world gdp fell by about 10% in the first half of 2020. Yet much has changed since—including that more people are now wearing masks. Economists, obsessed with translating everything into gdp, wonder if more widespread face-covering could help the recovery.

Cybersecurity oversight is a key fiduciary responsibility for a board of directors and was a significant concern for companies even before the COVID-19 pandemic forced so many organizations to suddenly shift to remote work. Data breaches and other cyber threats pose significant competitive, reputational, and litigation risks and require increasingly costly investments to prevent, detect, and respond to. Changes in the environment as a result of the pandemic have created new risks that need to be managed with board oversight.

A very useful, locally produced web site that provides daily information on the pandemic nationally.

“We argued in the original preprint version of this article on 17 July that Melbourne and Victoria should not waste the opportunity that the (then) 6-week lockdown presented and go hard and early.

By learning from the lessons on social and preventive measures to lower SARS-CoV-2 transmissibility (7,8,12,14), and specifically the lessons from NZ (3), Taiwan and the six Australian jurisdictions that have achieved elimination, Victoria could have increased its chances of also eliminating community transmission.”

University of Melbourne modelled several policy scenarios.

If we ease restrictions when the average number of cases over the previous fortnight is 25 (350 cases total) then it’s more likely than not that cases will get out of hand and restrictions will have to be reinstated to regain control and protect the health system.

Waiting until the average is 5 cases a fortnight – or 70 cases total - reduces the chance of increased restrictions before Christmas to just 3 in 100.

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"This has been a really strong evolution going from the 80s, the 90s, the 2000s, to take fat out of the supply chain, to tighten down everything," says supply-chain management expert Rich Weissman. He says in the past 10 years companies have come to "really rely on analytics to fine-tune supply chains to make sure that supply and demand absolutely line up". "And that's where I think we've gone too far.”

The heavy dependence on China across industry verticals is an obvious example of the sole-sourced nature of today’s supply chains.

"They're becoming more capable of conducting these attacks successfully," Goody says about the hackers. "As these criminal organizations grow, they're growing like a regular business would. They're building out different teams who can conduct these intrusion operations at a greater scale, or with greater efficiency, or without being detected. That's going to continue to grow as well."

London Bullion Market Association Webinar Sustainable Finance: Risks & Policy Dr Paul Fisher (Fellow, Cambridge University Institute for Sustainability Leadership) and Terry Heymann (CFO, World Gold Council) discussed what sustainability means and the importance of ESG.

Paul considered how we should think about the risks and opportunities sustainability presents to the financial sector, before looking at how regulators globally are responding to those risks.

Terry presented WGC’s findings on climate change, tracking gold’s carbon footprint through the supply chain, and considered how reducing this footprint can benefit the mining and investment industries.

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Companies are often quick to tout their green credentials. So are many of the sophisticated institutional investors who buy and sell their shares. Yet when it comes to pricing the risk of climate change, those investors may be falling short. New research suggests that the risk of climatic disasters such as floods, storms and wildfires are not reflected in the price of equities around the world. What is more, when disasters do occur, the fall in share prices is modest.