Focus on The 2015 G7 Summit - Bavaria, Germany

Welcome to the Investors Trading Academy event of the week. Each week our staff of analysts and educators tries to provide you a better understanding of a major market event scheduled during the next week. This week we will focus on the upcoming “G8- meeting”. The 2015 G8 meeting was scheduled to be held in Russia but was suspended as tension continues to escalate between Russia and the Ukraine. Germany says it will hold the next Group of Eight. Then tentative date has been moved to June 7th. Chancellor Angela Merkel said the meeting of leaders from the world's top eight economic powers will be held in the summer of 2015 at Schloss Elmau, near the ski resort of Garmisch-Partenkirchen and close to the Austrian border.
The G-8 summit has become a major security challenge for host countries over recent years, with protesters kept well away and many hosts choosing out-of-the-way venues.
G8 meetings are usually attended by finance ministers and central bankers from the G7 nations - Canada, Italy, France, Germany, Japan, the UK, and the US - with the addition of Russia. The meetings are closed to the press but officials usually talk with reporters throughout the day, and a formal statement covering policy shifts and meeting objectives is released after the meetings have concluded.
Since 1975, the heads of state or government of the major industrial democracies have been meeting annually to deal with the major economic and political issues facing their domestic societies and the international community as a whole.
The six countries at the first summit, held at Rambouillet, France, in November 1975, were France, the United States, Britain, Germany, Japan and Italy (sometimes referred to as the G6). They were joined by Canada at the San Juan Summit of 1976 in Puerto Rico, and by the European Community at the London Summit of 1977. From then on, membership in the Group of Seven, or G7, was fixed, although 15 developing countries' leaders met with the G7 leaders on the eve of the 1989 Paris Summit, and the USSR and then Russia participated in a post-summit dialogue with the G7 since 1991.
Starting with the 1994 Naples Summit, the G7 met with Russia at each summit. The Denver Summit of the Eight was a milestone, marking full Russian participation in all but financial and certain economic discussions; and the 1998 Birmingham Summit saw full Russian participation, giving birth to the Group of Eight, or G8 although the G7 continued to function alongside the formal summits.

By Barry Norman, Investors Trading Academy