To receive our full morning briefing, including markets and paper review, as well as an update at lunchtime, sign up here. These are the highlights this morning.
Good morning. House prices fell for the fourth consecutive month in December according to data released this morning by Halifax, the UK’s largest mortgage lender.
Month-on-month house prices fell 1.5 per cent in December, having dropped by 2.3 per cent in November. Year-on-year prices were 2 per cent higher, down from 4.6 per cent in November. The typical UK property now costs £281,272, against £285,425 the previous month.
Kim Kinnaird, director at Halifax Mortgages, said: “As we enter 2023 the housing market will continue to be impacted by the wider economic environment and, as buyers and sellers remain cautious, we expect there will be a reduction in both supply and demand overall, with house prices forecast to fall around 8 per cent over the course of the year.”
We’ll have a full story shortly from Tom Howard on thetimes.co.uk.
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On the corporate front this morning:
SHELL: The FTSE-100 oil giant has warned that UK and EU windfall taxes will cost the company about $2 billion in the fourth quarter. Before announcing fourth-quarter results next month Shell also warned that prolonged outages at two big plants in Australia had hit liquefied natural gas production.
CLARKSON: The London-listed shipping broker expects full-year results to be better than market expectations after strong trading in the final three months of 2022. The company forecasts underlying pre-tax profit of not less than £98 million. It reports full-year results in March.
FRASERS: The owner of Sports Direct appears to have cut its stake in Hugo Boss to 28.9 per cent, from a reported 34 per cent in November. Frasers owns its stake through directly held shares in the German fashion brand and derivative contracts. In a brief statement Frasers says that its aggregate exposure is now approximately €660 million, down from €1 billion disclosed in November.
On the economics front, we will get the construction PMI data for December at 9.30am. Pantheon Macroeconomics forecast a reading of 48.5, down from 50.4 in November, as many builders were forced by last month’s heavy snowfall to down tools.
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The focus will shift to America at lunchtime with the release of the closely watched employment report for December (1.30pm UK time). Economists suspect that non-farm payrolls grew by 200,000, down from 263,000 in November. The unemployment rate is forecast to remain at 3.7 per cent.
Finally if, like me, you pined after a Chopper bike as a child, take a moment to read today’s Times obituary for Tom Karen, the free-thinking British industrial designer whose inventions included Marble Run, the Reliant Scimitar car and of course that most distinctive bike. He really was “the man who designed the 1970s”.
Please keep sending your thoughts, observations (and corrections) to me at richard.fletcher@thetimes.co.uk and follow me on Twitter, @fletcherr, for a first glimpse of tomorrow’s business section front page.
Have a great weekend. I’ll be back in your inbox on Monday morning.
Richard