Trinity Mirror in talks to buy Express and Star for £130m
Before, we take a look at the equity markets, some UK corporate news.
Trinity Mirror – the publisher of the Daily Mirror – is in exclusive talks to buy the Daily Express, Sunday Express and Daily Star, which are owned by Richard Desmond’s Northern & Shell.
The deal is thought to be worth about £130m and also includes Northern & Shell’s magazines, including OK!, New! and Star.
Here is our full story with all the background on the deal:
The agenda: euro pushes higher; UK trade and production
Good morning and welcome to our rolling coverage of the world economy, the financial markets, the eurozone and business.
The cautious tone adopted by Mario Draghi, the president of the European Central Bank, at Thursday’s policy press conference failed to put off investors who piled into the euro.
Instead, those buying the euro heard two things: Eurozone growth has been stronger than expected so far this year, so much so that the ECB now expects growth this year to be 2.2% – the strongest in a decade.
The second thing they heard was that the ECB’s governing council will “probably” be ready to make a decision in October on whether to taper its €60bn a month bond-buying programme. Investors assumed this meant the programme will be scaled back to purchases of about €40bn a month from January 2018.
A stronger euro is not helpful to Draghi and his colleagues at the ECB, not least because it dampens inflation which is currently at 1.3%. But a stronger euro is what they’ve got, with Draghi’s comments sending the euro through the €1.20 on Thursday.
Those gains have continued this morning, with the euro currently up 0.3% against the dollar at $1.2060, having hit an earlier high of $1.2092. That’s the strongest in more than two and half years.
A reminder how events unfolded on Thursday:
Also coming up today is a flurry of UK data, all at 09.30:
