Investors Await Pre-Budget Report
Chancellor of the Exchequer, Alistair Darling, was due to deliver his Pre-Budget Report at lunchtime on Wednesday, in which he was expected to unveil not only a 50% tax on bank bonus payments above £10,000, but also a raft of public spending cuts.
Dominic Turner
shareprices.com - Wednesday, December 09, 2009
By 9.00 a.m., the FTSE 100 index was down 13.67 points, or 0.2% at 5,210.67, having closed down 87.53 points on Tuesday, with selling prompted by further worries over debt in Dubai.
Share prices in the banking sector were mixed; Barclays was down 9%, Standard Chartered remained flat despite issuing a positive trading update in which it reiterated that its exposure to Dubai was immaterial and said that it was on course for a record year, but HSBC, Lloyds Banking Group and Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) were all in the blue by between 0.6% and 1.7%. Lloyds Banking Group, whose discounted rights issue is to end on Friday, benefited from a broker note and a newspaper report that senior traders at RBS are to share £25 million in bonus payments failed to dent its share price.
The price of crude oil rose $0.81 to $73.43, but nevertheless remained well below October highs and energy companies suffered as a result; BP, BG Group, Cairn Energy and Royal Dutch Shell were all down by between 0.3% and 0.8%. In the mining sector, BHP Billiton, the largest mining company in the world, announced the sale of its Ravensthorpe nickel mine in Western Australia to Canadian firm, First Quantum Minerals, for $US340 million. BHP Billiton's share price fell 44.5p or 2.35%, to 1,846p on the news.
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