UK employment as expected - Investec

Research Team at Investec, suggests that yesterday’s UK employment data which made up so much of the foundation of the budget speech came in as expected.

Key Quotes

“Consistent with Investec and consensus forecasts, the unemployment rate in the three months to January remained steady at 5.1%. Employment growth slowed to 166k in the three months to January, a little softer than the 144k expectation, but this is still a fairly solid growth rate.

It looks like the wage slowdown we saw during last year has bottomed out, but the uptick so far is still fairly muted. This softness in wages, combined with low CPI inflation (currently running at 0.3% yoy), is the key reason why the BoE looks is unlikely to look to raising interest rates until the turn of the year.”