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All eyes on Bank of England with 25bps rate rise expected
The FTSE 100 is expected to open higher after falling heavily on Wednesday with all eyes on the interest rate decision by the Bank of England at midday.
Spread betting companies are calling London’s lead index by around 10 points after closing down 104.64 points at 7,561.63 on Wednesday.
The BoE is expected to hike rates by another 25 basis points to 5.25%, a more modest increase than the larger 50bps raise at its last meeting.
Since then, there have been some more encouraging figures on inflation which “should take the pressure off the BoE to deliver another bumper rate increase at this month's meeting," according to Matthew Ryan at Ebury.
In London, it’s another bumper day of company news with updates from Mondi (LON:MNDI), Next, Rolls-Royce (LON:RR), Serco, Smith & Nephew amongst others.
On Wednesday, US markets fell sharply in the wake of the credit ratings downgrade by Fitch while today markets in Asia were mixed.
The Nikkei 225 index in Tokyo was down 1.2%. In China, the Shanghai Composite was up 0.4%, while the Hang Seng index in Hong Kong was up 0.3%.