This week the Chancellor delivered his first full budget; while the last chancellor made an ill-fated dash for growth, this time there were a few measures announced that actually addressed the underlying problem, low investment and a shrinking workforce. Tax breaks to encourage the former and pension reform and free childcare to try and reverse the latter. Time will tell how effective they’ll be, by themselves not very would be my guess, but as the start of a long-term plan of targeted pro-growth policies they could have an impact eventually.
Elsewhere the nascent banking crisis that panicked markets looks to have mostly blown over. As is now tradition, central banks stepped in to prop up the struggling lenders. The actions taken in the US, Europe and the UK were all slightly different, but amounted to the same calming of nerves. That the US regulations left a significant loophole to allow for the bad behaviour that kicked everything off is more worrying, and will hopefully be rectified as part of the fallout.
Read what the team at Financial Express consider to be significant over the current week.