Investors entered the long Easter weekend with a spring in their step as the FTSE 100 finished at a 12-month high, driven by market-friendly numbers on America’s economic recovery.
The US commerce department’s revised measure of US gross domestic product confirmed that the world’s biggest economy had slowed from a red-hot 4.9 per cent rate of annual expansion in the July-to-September quarter to a cooler, but still solid, 3.4 per cent rate of growth in the three months to the end of December.
That caused traders to raise their bets on the US Federal Reserve making three interest rate cuts this year, in turn injecting a fresh dose of confidence into global equities. The FTSE 100 index rose 20.64 points, or 0.3 per cent, to
