| Good morning. The UK's £100 billion Brexit bill, the IMF raises its growth forecast and Abu Dhabi royals back Adani. Here's what people are talking about. Brexit is costing the UK economy £100 billion a year ($124 billion), with the effects spanning everything from business investment to the ability of companies to hire workers. An analysis by Bloomberg Economics three years after Britain left the European Union paints a bleak picture of the damage done by the way the split has been implemented by the Conservative government. The International Monetary Fund raised its global economic growth outlook for the first time in a year, with resilient US spending and China's reopening buttressing demand against a litany of risks. Gross domestic product will likely expand 2.9% in 2023, 0.2 percentage point more than forecast in October, the fund said Tuesday in Singapore in a quarterly update to its World Economic Outlook. While that's a slowdown from a 3.4% expansion in 2022, the IMF said it expects growth will bottom out this year, accelerating to 3.1% in 2024. Abu Dhabi's International Holding Co. will invest about $400 million in Adani Enterprises Ltd.'s follow-on share sale, voicing confidence in Indian billionaire Gautam Adani's business empire after almost $70 billion was wiped off its market value. The funding from IHC, which is controlled by a key member of the emirate's royal family, will represent about 16% of the offering and follows an almost $2 billion investment in Adani's companies last year. The European Union is seeking to rapidly accelerate production of clean technologies by offering tax credits and domestic subsidies to companies in a bid to catch up with US President Joe Biden's landmark green package. The European Commission, the EU's executive arm, will propose a plan enabling the bloc to avoid strategic dependencies on key clean technologies by diversifying suppliers and developing local production, according to a draft of the commission's Green Deal Industrial Plan seen by Bloomberg News. European stocks are tipped to nudge lower with investors focused on crucial central bank decisions this week. Norway's wealth fund presents key figures for 2022. France faces more strikes that will affect flights, trains and public transport as labor unions continue protests against proposed pension reforms. Expected data include GDP for France, Italy and Portugal, plus CPI inflation for France and Germany. UBS's high level of surplus capital has analysts looking for a potential increase in buybacks when it unveils earnings. Epiroc and UniCredit are also among a slew of other names reporting. This is what's caught our eye over the past 24 hours Snow bomb or no snow bomb, this winter is essentially over as far as a European energy crisis is concerned. And with every day that goes by, worry about next winter's natural gas supplies should fade. With European inventories 74% full -- the highest at this point in a year since 2010, the odds of grid failure is virtually zero. Focus will thus shift to the TTF December 2023 contract, and more price declines are likely. Sure, Europe can't rely on Russian inflows. But time is a friend. Every month that rolls by is another month that the continent's policymakers and utility companies have to put new infrastructure in place. We've already seen agreement on Qatari gas, new LNG terminals and faster shifts to renewable sources. In the mean time, the December contract is priced about 200% higher than the average for the 2010s. This seems an unlikely equilibrium. This commentary first ran on Markets Live on the Bloomberg Terminal, where Eddie van der Walt is Deputy Managing Editor based in London. Follow him on Twitter at @EdVanDerWalt
The tech sector layoffs in the US have already topped 100,000. Do you agree with Bank of America's analysts, who say that the sector is still bloated? What about the the AI, especially the systems like ChatGPT, are those a threat to white-collar jobs, or a good investment opportunity? Share your views in our latest MLIV Pulse survey. | 
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