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Given the United Kingdom’s forthcoming departure from the European Union, few of us who follow the Chancellor’s Budget announcement closely were expecting 2018’s offering to be anything other than cautious, and so it came as little surprise that, once again, Philip Hammond has steered away from making any grand gestures.
The unconventional timing of the speech – it was moved from the usual 12:30 slot on a Wednesday, after PMQs, to 15:30 on a Monday – meant that the day’s stock market session had closed when Hammond finished speaking, and so there is little to say about the reaction of the financial markets.
On the basis of today’s announcements though, it feels safe to say that we wouldn’t expect any major shift in market participants’ sentiment as a direct result of the Budget. Sterling was similarly sanguine relative to the US dollar and the euro, being down barely a third of a cent against the former over the day, and scarcely changed against the latter.
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