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The Euro continued its recent revival yesterday, making further gains against both the Dollar and Sterling. Last week’s warning by Jean-Claude Trichet, European Central Bank President, that ‘strong vigilance’ on inflation was warranted, has provided the catalyst for a period of Euro recovery that has continued past the weekend. Markets…
One of the main driving forces in the currency markets at the moment are interest rate rises, who is going to be the first to start the move back to more “normal” rates. The euro has started the week well holding onto gains made following ECB’s hawkish comments last week….
Unfortunately, we never quite managed to get a full run of upbeat purchasing managers index data, with yesterday’s service PMI coming in at 52.6, below consensus expectations of 54.3. Although it does still signal growth in the UK service sector it is sluggish and further underlines the fragility of the…
Yesterday saw sovereign debt return to the market, in both the Euro zone and the US. The S&P revised its long-term outlook on US debt from stable to negative citing, the lack of a plan in addressing the very large budget deficit means that the US is in a significantly…
The Euro is subdued against the dollar and sterling this morning as the sovereign debt crisis again raises its head. Yesterday the German finance minister admitted that Greek debt may need to be restructured, despite last year’s £97bn bail out. The reason for this restructuring is that the Greek government…
Good news! The Consumer Price Index (CPI) fell back from 4.4% in February to 4% in March as supermarkets and High Street chains cut prices. This is great news from a personal point of view as nothing attracts my eyes in a supermarket quite like a red and white sale…
It was only a couple of weeks ago that the morning note was reporting the biggest squeeze on people’s incomes since 1981. It now appears that this dire figure may have been overly optimistic, with the Centre for Economics and Business Research reporting at the weekend that household disposable income…
As expected, the Bank of England kept rates on hold at 0.5% for another month, with spiralling UK inflation not enough to convince the MPC to change direction. As ever, it won’t be until the minutes are released in a couple of weeks that we see how each member voted…
There was an unexpected piece of good news with yesterday’s services PMI surging to a 13 month high of 57.1 in March from 52.6 in February – with anything above 50 indicating growth. This 4.5 point rise in the index is the second biggest increase since the survey started in…
In a sign of the times the number of people resigning from their jobs has fallen to a five year low, as workers have little choice but to ride out the economic uncertainty. So if any of you are fed up with your job or your boss, I would strongly…