Source: Office for National Statistics

Preliminary data from the Office for National Statistics showed the UK economy recorded only modest expansion over the final three months of 2025.

In the three months to December, GDP rose 0.1%, matching the pace seen in Q3 but undershooting the 0.2% consensus estimate. Output was 1.0% higher than a year earlier, down from 1.2% in the previous quarter.

Liz McKeown, ONS director of economic statistics, said: “The often-dominant services sector showed no growth, with the main driver instead coming from manufacturing. Construction, meanwhile, registered its worst performance in more than four years.”

A breakdown of output showed that quarterly growth was driven by a 1.2% increase in production. The absence of any meaningful rebound in business investment was flagged as a concern by analysts, with government spending appearing to shoulder much of the burden. (LIveSquawk – Continue Reading)

In a closed-door meeting with Senate Republicans Wednesday, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent agreed with lawmakers who suggested the Senate Banking Committee could investigate Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, instead of the Justice Department, people in the room told Semafor.

One of the sources, a lawmaker, said they interpreted the exchange as “testing the waters” to see if the arrangement could get Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., to lift his blockade on Fed nominees. (Semafor – Continue Reading)

The Trump administration has shelved a number of key tech security measures aimed at Beijing ahead of an April meeting between the two countries' presidents. The measures include a ban on China Telecom's U.S. operations and restrictions on sales of Chinese equipment for U.S. data centres, sources said.

The U.S. has also put on hold proposed bans on domestic sales of routers made by TP-Link and the U.S. internet business of China Unicom and China Mobile along with another measure that would bar sales of Chinese electric trucks and buses in the U.S., four people said, declining to be named. (Reuters – Continue Reading)

The Trump administration is dramatically expanding an effort to revoke U.S. citizenship for foreign-born Americans as it works to curb immigration, according to two people familiar with the plans.

Over the past several months, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the agency within the Department of Homeland Security that’s responsible for legal immigration, has been sending experts to its offices around the country or reassigning staff members to focus on whether some citizens processed through those offices could now be denaturalized, these people said.

The goal of emphasizing naturalized citizens is to supply the office of immigration litigation with 100 to 200 possible cases per month, one of the people familiar with the plans said. Such cases have typically been very rare, involving people who concealed criminal histories or previous human rights violations during their application processes. The New York Times first reported the quota. (NBC – Continue Reading)