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PARIS Economic growth appears to be gathering traction in the United States and Britain, while China and Italy may be about to turn up, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development said on Monday. Signals continue to point to weak growth in Germany, France and the euro zone as a whole, however, and likewise in Japan, Russia and Canada, the Paris-based OECD said in a statement on its monthly composite leading indicator (CLI). The OECD said its October CLI reading for the United States and Britain remained above 100, which represents the long-term average of economic performance, rising respectively to [...]

Chancellor George Osborne delivers his annual Autumn Statement .UK austerity drive set to continue until 2018 as debt reduction target is missed Rating agency Fitch said missing the target ‘weakens the credibility of the UK’s fiscal framework’Fitch and Moody’s have put negative outlooks on the UK’s rating this year(Financial Times) — Britain will prolong its austerity drive until 2018 as the country’s independent budget watchdog slashed its economic growth forecasts and UK finance and economy minister missed one of his targets to improve the public finances.George Osborne, the chancellor, said Britain was still determined to eliminate its budget deficit even [...]

LONDON Britain will demand changes to the European Union’s regional development funds in budget talks this month, including stripping wealthier nations of access to money intended to help poorer areas, the Sunday Telegraph reported. Prime Minister David Cameron’s government suffered an embarrassing defeat in parliament this week when anti-EU members of his Conservative party teamed up with the opposition to demand a cut in the EU budget. But Cameron, aware that a real-terms cut could be hard to win in Brussels, is instead pushing for a real-terms freeze in the budget, which would allow it to rise in line with [...]

Economists cautioned that the strong bounce was to some extent a reflection of one-off factors such as the OlympicsBritain’s double-dip recession ended after the economy grew 1% between the second and third quartersEconomists cautioned that the strong bounce was to some extent a reflection of one-off factorsLondon (Financial Times) — Britain’s double-dip recession has ended after the economy grew 1 per cent between the second and third quarters, much more robustly than economists had expected.The strong rise in gross domestic product will come as a relief to the coalition government, whose austerity programme has come in for fierce criticism as [...]

BRUSSELS Britain warned on Wednesday it would be unacceptable for the European Central Bank to have too dominant a role in a new system of supervision designed to watch over the region’s banks. Brussels proposed earlier this month that the ECB take charge of supervising all banks in the euro currency zone, as a first step towards creating a banking union under which euro zone countries would eventually jointly back their lenders. “We have concerns on the current banking union proposal especially the potential for the ECB to dominate decisions,” UK financial services minister Greg Clark told reporters. “As things [...]