Striking ambulance staff stand on a picket line at London’s Waterloo Ambulance Station last Friday. The attack only affects non-life-threatening phones © Carl Court / Getty Images
It’s another week of British industrial unrest. Civil servants at the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency will also strike on Monday, followed on Wednesday by university staff – although there will be no more teaching staff in Wales – and then ambulance workers in Northern Ireland on Friday.
At the very least, the UK government will be hard at work, negotiating with the EU on a post-Brexit settlement for Northern Ireland as soon as possible. The issue is not on the official agenda for a meeting of EU member states in Brussels on Thursday, but London hopes to make progress in discussions with European leaders in the coming days.
NATO defense chiefs will also meet this week in Brussels to discuss the next step in their brinkmanship with Russia. The invitees included the defense minister of Ukraine and his colleagues from Finland and Sweden.
And the good news? Kosovo will celebrate 15 years of independence on Friday and in Rio the annual Carnival begins on Saturday.
Economic data
Inflation and gross domestic product are the main economic themes this week with data from the UK, US, India and France and the latter from the EU and Japan. The UK also provided an update on the labor market with new unemployment figures.
There are no meetings of the monetary policy committees of the major economies but on Tuesday Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida is expected to nominate as the next governor of the central bank the respected expert and supporter of the country’s ultra-loose monetary policy, Kazuo Ueda.
This will ensure a smooth transition from Haruhiko Kuroda, who is due to step down in April after overseeing a decade-long policy designed to keep interest rates at rock-bottom levels by buying huge amounts of government bonds.
Company
Krispy Kreme branch in Tokyo. Donut sellers are among the consumer goods companies reporting earnings this week © Toshiyuki Aizawa / Reuters
We are over the hump of the earnings season now, especially in the US, but there is a lot in the diary for the next seven days.
Consumer goods brands were big this week with figures from Nestlé, Coca-Cola, Krispy Kreme and Kraft Heinz. The company’s products may not be the healthiest things on supermarket shelves, but inflation is, too, which – if Unilever’s earnings report last week is anything to go by – could at least benefit its top line. company account. However, people cut back, which means they can reduce sales volume.
Interest rate increases for tame inflation has been good news for retail banks with widening net interest income for lenders such as NatWest, which reported full year figures on Friday. This is good for shareholders because it will push capital levels up to more than the regulatory minimum and open the door to some fairly lucrative dividend increases and share buybacks. Also, NatWest is still 44.98 percent owned by the UK government so the current earnings bonanza is good for UK taxpayers, although as my colleague Helen Thomas notes it will not last.
Barclays, which reported on Wednesday, had a different story. UK businesses should benefit from the rise in rates, but more credit card businesses, so people will focus on standard rates and provisions in the UK and US. Also the decrease in earnings in the investment bank, especially the advisory unit and the capital market, will be very focused. You can get a fuller picture by reading this Inside Business report from FT deputy editor Patrick Jenkins.
Read next week’s calendar in full here.