(Reuters) -London’s FTSE 100 ended flat on Wednesday as a decline in heavyweight copper miners’ shares overshadowed positive corporate updates and expectations of further monetary policy easing.
After touching a record high earlier in the session, the blue-chip FTSE 100 gradually lost steam to end marginally lower, snapping a five-day winning streak. The midcap FTSE 250 index retreated 0.1% after it reached a more-than-two-week high.
The broader European STOXX 600 index also rose to a record high, with markets appearing to ignore fresh tariff threats from new U.S. President Donald Trump, who vowed to hit the European Union with tariffs and said his administration was discussing a 10% punitive duty on Chinese imports.
Back home, Britain ran a bigger-than-expected budget deficit in December, swelled by debt interest costs and a one-off purchase of military homes, according to data that underlined the fiscal pressure faced by finance minister Rachel Reeves.
However, Reeves said on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland that Britain’s finances were now in order following her October budget, and her future instincts were for lower taxes and less regulation.
Public sector net borrowing was 17.8 billion pounds ($21.93 billion) in December, while economists polled by Reuters had a median forecast of 14.1 billion pounds.
“The pressure is on the chancellor to get public finances in order and to accelerate economic activity. Increasingly, it looks like both cannot be done in unison,” said Russ Mould, investment director at AJ Bell.
Among individual stocks, a slide in copper prices from one-month highs pressured shares of major producers Glencore and Rio Tinto by 0.9% and 0.4% respectively.
EasyJet tumbled about 5% as the airline flagged a weaker-than-expected revenue forecast for the second quarter.
Hochschild Mining tumbled 17% to the bottom of the domestic FTSE 250 index after the miner issued fourth quarter gold production forecasts.
Shares in Trainline fell nearly 7% after Britain’s transport department announced plans for a new online train ticket retailer.
Quilter climbed 2.1% after the wealth manager reported a rise in fourth-quarter managed assets, driven by nearly 2 billion pounds ($2.46 billion) in net inflows from its wealthy clients.
(Reporting by Sruthi Shankar and Medha Singh in Bengaluru; Editing by Vijay Kishore)
