The pound has remained broadly steady against the euro since Friday, while strengthening fractionally against the US dollar. However, early trading today has been negative.
There wasn’t a huge amount of data around yesterday, but the UK housing market is remaining in robust health, with the BBA Mortgage Rate showing the highest number of approvals since March 2020. Also yesterday, Michael Saunders, one of the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) members said in a speech that inflation could exceed forecasts and interest rates may need to rise faster than expected to combat it. He was outvoted in last week’s MPC meeting.
This morning we have seen the effect of the rising cost of living as the BRC retail sales monitor for April showed a decline of 1.7% compared to last year and a 0.4% decline from last month.
The big event of the week is undoubtedly GDP for the last quarter, Q1, which comes out on Thursday along with a lot of other industrial, manufacturing and construction data.
