LONDON – Britons appeared to be getting ahead of the current headwinds buffeting household budgets. Despite the prospect of rising utility bills stemming from the Middle East conflict, consumption remained robust over the first quarter.

The Office for National Statistics said headline retail sales rose 0.7% m/m in March, beating expectations for no growth. February’s reading was revised two-tenths lower to -0.6%. On an annual basis, sales increased 1.7%, ahead of the 1.1% forecast but slightly below a downwardly revised 1.8% prior.

Underlying sales also surprised to the upside. In the three months to March, sales improved 1.6% compared with the three months to December.

Hannah Finselbach, senior statistician at the ONS, said commercial art galleries performed strongly earlier in the quarter, while beauty product retailers reported higher sales linked to new collections. “Motor fuel sales were up on the quarter, with retailers commenting that many motorists had been filling up their tanks in March following the start of conflict in the Middle East.”

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FRANKFURT –– The mood among business leaders in Europe’s largest economy tumbled to its lowest mark in nearly six years as the Iran war stoked concerns about inflation and economic growth.

Germany’s Ifo economics institute said Friday that the April survey of domestic companies produced a decline in its headline business climate index to 84.4 points, the lowest since May 2020 and short of the market estimate of 85.7 and last month’s downwardly revised reading of 86.3

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“The German economy is being hit hard by the Iran crisis,” the thinktank explained.

EUR/USD took a slight bid before and after the report, but not enough to break through resistance at 1.17.

Ifo reported that its April expectations component for the coming six months slid to 83.3 points – the lowest since August 2023 – versus the economists’ forecast of 85.5 and the downwardly revised mark of 85.9 in March.

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LITTLETON, Colorado, April 24 (Reuters) - U.S. LNG Exporters Have So Far Offset The Drop In Shipments From Qatar Following Iranian Attacks On Its Facilities And The Closure Of Key Middle East Shipping Lanes, Ensuring That Total Supplies Remain At Record Highs Despite The War.

The On-Again, Off-Again Peace Talks With Iran Mean That The Repair Of Damaged Qatari Liquefied Natural Gas Export Sites Remains A Distant Prospect, And Could Result In A Years-Long Dent To Supplies From The World's Third-Largest Producer.

The Attacks Wiped Out 17% Of Qatar's LNG Export Capacity For Up To Five Years, Qatarenergy's CEO Said Last Month.

So Far, U.S. Exporters Have Plugged The Supply Gap By Cranking Liquefaction Capacity To The Maximum And Tightening Vessel Loading Schedules To Squeeze Out Additional Volumes.

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LONDON, April 24 (Reuters Breakingviews) - When a groundbreaking new technology arrives, it’s often easier to spot the losers than the winners, says the writer and investor Alisdair Nairn. Over recent months, stocks in sectors from software to information services deemed to be facing a threat from machine intelligence have taken a hit. Yet the history of past technology booms shows the stock market has a spotty record of identifying losers. The best rule to follow at such times is biblical. As the Gospel of Matthew (20:16) states: “So the last shall be first, and the first last: for many be called, but few chosen.”

When the first British steam railway, between Stockton and Darlington, opened in 1825, it was cheaper and faster at moving goods than canals. Yet investors in British canal stocks remained complacent to this threat for the best part of a decade. Fifty years later, the dominant U.S. telegraph company, Western Union, showed a similar disregard to the threat to its business posed by Alexander Bell’s new telephones. Bell received his patents in 1875 and offered to sell them to Western Union for a pittance the following year. The company turned him down. Western Union outperformed the U.S. stock market for a decade to the mid-1890s, despite the rapid advance of telephony.

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