Friday 12 June 2026 6:00 am
| Updated:
Friday 12 June 2026 6:27 am
Chancellor Rachel Reeves is tasked with growing the economy.
Good morning and welcome back to the City AM liveblog.We’re expecting fresh data at 7am this morning that will reveal the UK’s headline growth last month. A poll of City economists by Bloomberg suggests the economy will have contracted 0.1 per cent in April, which follows on from a 0.3 per cent expansion in March.This comes as the economic impacts of the Iran war begin to trickle through across the globe, witg inflation jumped to a three-year high over in the US according to new data earlier this week.Ben Caswell, a senior economist at the National Institute of Economic and Social Research (NIESR) think tank, said: “The UK economy is on a fragile footing.“While April’s GDP figures are expected to hold up, this resilience will be short-lived. Higher-frequency indicators suggest that, from May onwards, the conflict in the Middle East will start to weigh heavily on economic activity.”Meanwhile, the impacts of the war continue to pose fresh threats to wreak havoc across global markets. On Thursday Donald Trump said the US woukd be “hitting” Iran very hard and taking “total control” of the country’s oil and gas markets.But hours later, he would go on to cancel the strikes and later say a “great settlement” has been agreed with Tehran and a deal is set to be signed “maybe over the weekend”.The price of Brent crude oil moved higher amidst the volatility to just over $94 per barrel, before softening slightly.Equity investors have began to shrug off some of the movements, with the FTSE 100 finishing higher in the green on Thursday as the index was also able to curb some of the heavier sell-offs this week targeted at tech stocks.We’ll be bringing you the latest reaction to these moves and more.Last night’s top stories:
