Sunny spells, icy showers and an inflationary wind blowing from America
Daffodils everywhere and the FTSE is back around 6,000. Builders are busy after the frozen winter, it’s ‘business as usual’ again in financial services, and although manufacturing lost momentum in March — exports remained strong, but nervous consumers depressed domestic demand — industry is generally perky. The British Chambers of Commerce expect first-quarter growth of 0.6 per cent or better, reversing the previous 0.5 per fall — and although recovery could be sluggish for the rest of the year, the trend will be in the right direction.
So there’s room for optimism, of a cautious kind. Like April’s weather, the forecast is mixed: sunny spells, icy showers, winds to blow your fence down. Shares have climbed back from a Libya-related dive on news suggesting America isn’t having the ‘jobless recovery’ that was feared: 470,000 private-sector jobs added in two months and official unemployment down a notch to 8.8
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