Rolling live coverage of business, economics and financial markets as the travel industry awaits UK holiday plans
- Jet2 suspends flights to 23 June because of uncertainty
- UK houses go for 6.5% more than at start of pandemic
- Sanjeev Gupta hits out at creditors seeking GFG assets
- FTSE 100 and EU stocks drop after Wall Street records
An interesting story from the Financial Times (£) that French wine growers have faced hard frosts that have done severe damage to the grape crop.
Severe frosts across France this week have badly damaged buds and flowers in vineyards and fruit orchards and will cut grape harvests in some areas by as much as 90 per cent, according to growers and farmers’ organisations.
“It was like winter coming in spring,” said Didier Delagrange, whose family has made wine from grapes grown on the slopes of Volnay in Burgundy for seven generations.
The UK’s Office for National Statistics is due to release its GDP figures for February on Tuesday. There might not be much to celebrate in those numbers, but things could get better quickly.
The UK economy has “a bit of a spring in its step”, according to Paul Dales, chief UK economist at Capital Economics.
There are mounting signs that the effects on the economy from the third COVID-19 lockdown have started to thaw.
The jump in the IHS Markit/CIPS all-sector purchasing managers’ index (PMI) from 50.0 in February to a seven-month high of 56.8 in March suggests that a bigger rise in GDP probably took place last month. And in the week to 1 April, spending on credit and debit cards rose to 12% below the pre-pandemic level from 17% below at the start of March.
What’s more, there is some evidence that this increase in activity may be prompting businesses to start hiring again.