(Reuters) – London’s FTSE 100 touched a record high on Wednesday, as positive corporate updates and expectations of further monetary policy easing outweighed worries about tariffs promised by U.S. President Donald Trump.
The blue-chip FTSE 100 rose 0.3% by 1047 GMT, extending gains for a sixth straight session, while the midcap FTSE 250 index edged up 0.4% to touch a more-than-two-week high.
The broader European STOXX 600 index also touched a record high, with markets appearing to ignore fresh tariff threats from 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.
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,” Russ Mould, investment director at AJ Bell.
Among individual stocks, airline easyJet dropped 2.3%, with analysts pointing to a slightly weaker-than-expected revenue forecast for the second quarter, although the outlook for the summer remains positive.
Aviva jumped 4.1% after J.P.Morgan upgraded the insurer to “overweight” from “neutral”.
Hochschild Mining tumbled 13% after the miner issued gold production forecasts for 2025.
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 in Bengaluru; Editing by Vijay Kishore)
