{"id":677,"date":"2017-03-08T08:34:31","date_gmt":"2017-03-08T08:34:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wealthatwork.co.uk\/jpm\/?p=677"},"modified":"2019-03-12T11:51:30","modified_gmt":"2019-03-12T11:51:30","slug":"cautious-budget-as-brexit-looms","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www2.wealthatwork.co.uk\/jpm\/2017\/03\/08\/cautious-budget-as-brexit-looms\/","title":{"rendered":"Cautious Budget as Brexit Looms."},"content":{"rendered":"<h2><strong><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"alignleft size-medium wp-image-678\" src=\"http:\/\/www2.wealthatwork.co.uk\/jpm\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/18\/2017\/04\/shutterstock_145853606-1_resized-300x199.jpg\" alt=\"shutterstock_145853606-1_resized\" width=\"300\" height=\"199\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www2.wealthatwork.co.uk\/jpm\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/18\/2017\/04\/shutterstock_145853606-1_resized-300x199.jpg 300w, https:\/\/www2.wealthatwork.co.uk\/jpm\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/18\/2017\/04\/shutterstock_145853606-1_resized.jpg 360w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\" \/><\/strong><\/h2>\n<p><strong>Ian Copelin, Investment Director, comments <\/strong>\u2018Today was Budget day in the UK.\u00a0 And while the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Philip Hammond did crack a few jokes, unlike his predecessor George Osborne, he didn\u2019t play to the crowd and instead showed that he was more of a steady hand on the tiller.<\/p>\n<p>I would summarise it as a very cautious, short (55 minutes) Budget statement.\u00a0 I don\u2019t think it was a Budget from a government that was even remotely considering calling an early, snap election.<\/p>\n<p>As Philip Hammond had already made it clear that the UK economy needs \u201creserves in the tank\u201d to help maintain flexibility and cushion against any economic deterioration due to Brexit uncertainty over the next few years, he had limited scope for any giveaways.<\/p>\n<p>While he didn\u2019t make any big announcements, he did announce some good news:\u00a0 the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) had increased its GDP forecast for 2017 as the UK economy \u201chas continued to confound the commentators with robust growth and a labour market delivering record employment\u201d following June\u2019s referendum.<\/p>\n<p>The OBR now forecasts economic growth of 2% for 2017 compared with 1.4% predicted at the time of the Autumn Statement on 23 November 2016, while the budget deficit is now expected to be \u00a351.7bn for 2016\/17 compared with the \u00a368.2bn forecast in November.<\/p>\n<p>This helped the pound bounce off its seven-week low of US$1.2139.\u00a0 As I write the pound is $1.2171 \u2013 albeit still down 0.30% on the day.<\/p>\n<p>However, it wasn\u2019t all good news as his higher growth forecast is limited to this year.\u00a0 The OBR has clearly spotted that recent economic data is showing signs of turning down and has captured that shift as GDP growth for 2018 was trimmed to 1.6% from 1.7%, while growth in 2019 was cut to 1.7% from 2.1% and 2020 was trimmed to 1.9% from 2.1%.\u2019<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n   ","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Today was Budget day in the UK.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":678,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www2.wealthatwork.co.uk\/jpm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/677"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www2.wealthatwork.co.uk\/jpm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www2.wealthatwork.co.uk\/jpm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www2.wealthatwork.co.uk\/jpm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www2.wealthatwork.co.uk\/jpm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=677"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www2.wealthatwork.co.uk\/jpm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/677\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":679,"href":"https:\/\/www2.wealthatwork.co.uk\/jpm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/677\/revisions\/679"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www2.wealthatwork.co.uk\/jpm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/678"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www2.wealthatwork.co.uk\/jpm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=677"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www2.wealthatwork.co.uk\/jpm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=677"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www2.wealthatwork.co.uk\/jpm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=677"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}