A record on the stock exchange
The London Stock Exchange's FTSE 100 Index, which is based on the shares of a hundred large-cap companies, gained 84 points, or 1.1 per cent, to a record high of 7,906 points in trading on Friday.
The previous record of 7,903 points was set on 22 May 2018. According to experts polled by The Guardian newspaper, the index, which began calculating since 1984 at 1,000 points, rose on investor forecasts of an easing of the inflation shock from lower energy prices in Europe.
Economists note that the FTSE 100 has been showing strong gains over the past few weeks after Chinese authorities announced the lifting of a number of coronavirus restrictions and inflation slowed in the US.
The FTSE 100 index is focused on the international market and includes mining companies such as Rio Tinto and BHP, as well as oil companies BP and Shell. It also includes utilities such as electricity and water suppliers, consumer-facing companies such as Unilever, supermarkets Sainsbury's and Tesco, banks including Barclays, Lloyds, HSBC and NatWest, pharmaceutical firms AstraZeneca and GSK, and industrial groups Rolls-Royce and BAE Systems.
It is worth noting that multinational stocks benefited from the fall in the value of the pound on Friday, after the US economy created 517,000 new jobs in January, far more than expected.
City ignored the latest rise in UK, US and eurozone interest rates this week.
"The reason for the optimism is that markets are looking ahead and seeing a way out of the current economic downturn," said Hargreaves Lansdown, a leading equities analyst.
