UK shoppers are out in force again waving the debit cards issued by the banks they have stuck with through thick and thin.
UK retail sales growth in September was “astonishingly strong”, according to James Knightley at the Global Economics team at Dutch bank ING, rising 1.7% month-on-month once the impact of the Rugby World Cup has been stripped out.
Household goods stores saw sales rise 4.7%, while non-specialised stores saw sales rise 1.7% and non-store sales rose 3.4%.
Knightley notes that the dazzling figures are partly a rebound from a weather-depressed August trading period.
“With employment and real wage growth rising strongly, the housing market looking strong and consumer confidence at very high levels, there is a growing likelihood that Ian McCafferty will be joined by one, maybe two more MPC [Monetary Policy Committee] members in voting for a rate hike at the November 5th MPC meeting,” Knightly argues.
Chris Beauchamp of spread betting firm IG Index makes the initially strange assertion that “this morning’s figures appear to suggest that UK consumers are in no way put off by falling prices,” before explaining that the logical approach would be to hold off from spending until prices drop further.
Well, that's the dangers of disinflation explained in a nutshell, but what's with the reference to debit cards in the opening paragraph of this article?
Well, the Competition Markets Authority has released the provisional findings from its lengthy investigation into the high street banks, and it is hardly like an episode of “Tales of the Unexpected”, with the watchdog concluding that banking customers are too lazy to switch accounts.
Customers could save an average of £70 a year by switching their current accounts to another provider, the regulator has found. Put another way, if you drink in London pubs, that is about one-and-a-half pints of lager a month.
Of course, these sorts of savings add up but is anyone surprised that, despite the existence of the Current Account Switching Service, which has made it a lot easier to switch banking accounts, doing so is still a long way down the list of priorities of most people?
The savings become a bit more worthwhile for heavy overdraft users, who could save up to £260 a year. I know plenty of extremely well-educated people – i.e. people who emerged from university with massive debts - who are heavy overdraft users and yet none of them have been smart enough to switch bank accounts to get a better deal, so I wish the CMA well in its attempts to overcome inertia in this respect.
On the subject of banks, Lloyds Banking (LON:LLOY) has asked a London judge to throw out parts of a shareholder dispute over the bank's disastrous acquisition of HBOS.
Many of the allegations are “fanciful”, Lloyds maintains. Those allegations include claims that Lloyds executives knew before they bought HBOS that the latter was rigging its Libor rate submissions.
About 6,000 investors claim they lost about £350 million as the share price of the merged group collapsed during the credit crunch; now there's an amount worth getting worked up about.
At the smaller end of the scale, the partners in the Wressle onshore field in Lincolnshire plan to fast-track the development of the asset.
For reasons that are not easier to explain, some of the members of the consortium – e.g. Europa Oil (LON:EOG) - have seen their share price rise, while others, such as Egdon Resources (LON:EDR), are in the red.
Lastly, with the BBC about to start broadcasting “The Last Kingdom”, its flagship drama series based in Anglo-Saxon times, we are going to be hearing the word “Mercia” a lot more in the coming weeks, so Mercia Technologies (LON:MERC) is clearly ahead of the curve.
The investment group focused on technology companies based – where else? - in the Midlands, has completed a £1.2mln follow on investment as part of a total funding syndicate of £1.5m into Smart Antenna Technologies (SAT), a spin-off from the University of Birmingham.
All of which provide me with an excuse to mention that the near field communications technology Bluetooth, was named after King Harald Bluetooth, who unified – for a while at least – Denmark and Norway.