Britain’s economy shrank unexpectedly during the three months to October, according to official figures today that are likely to boost expectations for Bank of England interest rate cuts.<\/p>\n
The Office for National Statistics (ONS) said gross domestic product contracted by 0.1% in the August-to-October period. Economists polled by Reuters had forecast a flat reading.<\/p>\n
In October alone, the economy contracted by 0.1%, against forecasts for a 0.1% rise. While single-month GDP figures are volatile and prone to revision, today’s data means the UK economy has no’t grown since June.<\/p>\n
That underlined the tough economic backdrop that finance minister Rachel Reeves faced when she readied a big tax-raising budget that she announced on November 26.<\/p>\n
Today’s data showed unexpectedly sharp declines in the dominant services sector as well as construction.<\/p>\n
The figures also cast doubt on the Bank of England’s expectation that the economy will grow around 0.3% in the fourth quarter as a whole.<\/p>\n
Investors on Thursday had assigned a roughly 90% chance of a Bank of England interest rate cut on December 18.<\/p>\n
Manufacturing output, impaired in September by a cyber attack on Jaguar Land Rover, failed to recover as economists had hoped.<\/p>\n
The ONS said retailers in particular had a bad month, part of the reason why services output contracted by 0.3% in October against forecasts for a flat reading.<\/p>\n
In response to the data, the UK finance ministry said it was determined to defy the forecasts on growth and create good jobs.<\/p>\n
Compared with a year earlier, economic output was 1.1% higher in October, the ONS said, weaker than the 1.4% expansion forecast by economists.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Britain’s economy shrank unexpectedly during the three months to October, according to official figures today that are likely…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":188412,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[72,113,61,60],"class_list":["post-188411","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-economy","tag-business","tag-economy","tag-ie","tag-ireland"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/188411","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=188411"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/188411\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/188412"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=188411"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=188411"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=188411"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}