Taking Stock on Friday 28th September 2023
Taking Stock: Is a look at today's top business news & investment views plus we cover the winners, losers, the most read company news & the most followed. Today this includes:
The UK's economy has grown faster since the start of the Covid pandemic than initially thought.
Revised data indicates that the UK has seen faster growth than France or Germany since the end of 2019.
However, analysts said the UK was still suffering from lacklustre growth.
The latest figures from the ONS indicated that the UK's economy has grown by 1.8% since the pandemic started, whereas the previous estimate was a 0.2% contraction.
They also showed that the economy grew by 0.3% in the first three months of this year, up from the 0.1% previously estimated.
The estimate for the April-to-June quarter was unchanged at 0.2%.
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The government is on course to oversee the biggest tax-raising Parliament since records began, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies' analysis.
The IFS forecasts taxes will amount to about 37% of national income by the next general election, due in 2024.
That would be a level not seen since 1948, just after World War Two.
Responding to the report, a Treasury spokesperson said the "most effective tax cut we can deliver" is to "drive down inflation".
UK mortgage approvals touch six-month low but consumers borrow more
British lenders approved the fewest mortgages in six months in August, figures showed on Friday, in a further sign of the slowdown in the property market as mortgage interest rates rise, but borrowing by consumers gathered some steam.
Bank of England data showed banks and building societies approved 45,354 mortgages for house purchase in August, down from 49,532 in July and broadly in line with economists' expectations in a Reuters poll.
However, net mortgage lending - which typically lags approvals by around a month - was the highest since January at 1.218 billion pounds ($1.49 billion), after an unusually weak 201 million-pound increase in July.
The annual growth rate in unsecured borrowing increased to 7.6% in August from 7.3%, rising to its highest since April.