What, I ask you, is TTIP?
And no, before you even think it, the answer is not an incorrectly spelled Perthshire music festival sponsored by a popular lager brand.
TTIP actually stands for Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership and is a proposed free trade agreement between the US and the European Union.
It is under negotiation as we speak but I’d be willing to bet a pretty penny or two that a large proportion of the UK population have never heard of TTIP and that far fewer still are aware of what it could mean for the economy here in the UK.
In a nutshell the bare bones idea behind the TTIP framework is to ease trade between the US and EU markets that together account for around 60% of global gross domestic product.
The European Commission claims the implementation of a new pact, which would likely see the removal of tariffs that increase the costs of doing business, could result in a massive 50% increase in commerce between the two regions.
On the face of it, TTIP appears a good thing and proponents excitedly talk of improved commercial relations and greater prosperity on both sides of the Pond.
The UK Government has settled on the figure of £10 billion as its estimate of the potential annual prize from the implementation of a “successful and ambitious” TTIP.
That figure rises to £100bn for the EU as a whole, £80bn for the US and £85bn for the wider global economy once the benefits for the worldwide supply chain is taken into account.
It is a win-win-win situation.
But with anything as potentially important as TTIP, there is another side to the story.
Firstly, opponents strongly question whether the economic benefits being touted are actually achievable or wildly overinflated.
And then there is the concerns over what the UK would actually be signing up to.
Protesters fear that TTIP would open up the floodgates for corporate America to get their hands on the UK’s public services.
And they fear that the jewel in the crown, the NHS, will be the first lamb to the slaughter of a policy allowing privatisation through the back door.
The UK Government know the NHS is a line which people rightly baulk at crossing and this week tried to alleviate concerns with a statement that decisions about who runs NHS services would remain firmly with local managers.
Now, while I very much doubt that such a woolly statement will alleviate the naysayers’ concerns, the problem they face is that commerce is already a global entity.
From a trade perspective the world is already a small place and advances in digital technology mean it is becoming smaller day by day.
And that is why I believe the success or not of TTIP will ultimately be an irrelevance as the barriers that do exist will eventually melt away anyway.
The corporate world is necessarily relentless and if one door, in this case TTIP, slams shut then another will be prised open regardless.
After all, money talks.