Aurelia Butler

The Colombia store, to be opened on Thursday in the capital Bogota, will be the first in the country and will span three floors with 40 exhibition rooms. “The opening of our first store in Colombia is part of the brand’s plan to establish nine stores in Chile, Colombia and Peru over the next 10 years,” Hasbleidy Castaneda, IKEA’s manager in Colombia, said in an interview.The investment plan includes opening two more stores in Colombia next year, to be located in Medellin and Cali, the country’s second and third-largest cities respectively. IKEA has 450 stores in 60 countries, including in Chile, Mexico and the Dominican Republic. More

LONDON (Reuters) – Britain’s Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) estimated on Thursday that there was a 90% chance that public borrowing in four years’ time would be higher than the government’s budget watchdog has forecast.The IFS – a non-partisan think tank closely watched by politicians and economists – said borrowing in the 2027/28 tax year was likely to be 40 billion pounds ($49 billion) higher than the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) forecast in March, at 3.1% of gross domestic product rather than 1.7%.Finance minister Jeremy Hunt will set out new OBR forecasts and budget plans on Nov. 22, when he will seek to reconcile lowering inflation with fellow Conservative lawmakers’ desire for tax cuts ahead of a national election expected next year.Borrowing in the 2022/23 financial year totalled 128 billion pounds, or 5.1% of GDP, as Britain’s government spent heavily on energy subsidies after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine pushed up households’ and businesses’ heating bills.The IFS said OBR forecasts were unable to adjust for the tendency of British governments to borrow more during unexpected shocks such as the COVID-19 pandemic, but to spend the benefits of any unexpected tax windfall.”Past experience suggests that Chancellors don’t respond symmetrically to economic shocks. This represents a non-trivial risk to the accuracy of official borrowing forecasts, and potentially to fiscal sustainability,” IFS economist Isabel Stockton said.One solution could be to limit new tax and spending measures to a single fiscal event each year, rather than the current budget in the spring and fiscal update in the autumn, she said.Britain’s opposition Labour Party – which is leading the Conservatives in opinion polls by a wide margin – said last week it would aim to limit tax and spending measures to a single budget event in November.One of Hunt’s Conservative predecessors, Philip Hammond, expressed a similar aim in 2017.($1 = 0.8241 pounds) More

LONDON (Reuters) – More Britons made enquiries with estate agents about potential house purchases over the past four weeks as mortgage rates started to fall, breaking a downward trend which has been in place since April, property website Zoopla said on Thursday.Zoopla said the volume of viewing enquiries made for specific properties advertised by estate agents on its website had risen by 12% over the past four weeks, although it was still a third lower than a year earlier.”Better news on inflation and the end of base rate increases has provided scope for lenders to start reducing mortgage rates which has supported a modest uptick in demand for homes,” Zoopla’s executive director, Richard Donnell, said.Seasonal effects also aided the rise, Zoopla said.Weekly mortgage data collated by property website Rightmove (OTC:RTMVY) showed the average interest rate for a mortgage with a two-year fixed rate fell from an average of 6.41% in August to 6.07% this week. This still represents a sharp increase from 4.60% a year ago, when mortgage rates had already begun to climb after bond markets baulked at the then-Prime Minister Liz Truss’ budget plans as well as BoE tightening.Last week the BoE surprised many investors when it kept its interest rate on hold at 5.25%, following official data which showed an unexpected fall in consumer price inflation in August. Other housing market measures have shown a continued squeeze on property sales and prices.The Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors said its gauge of new buyer inquiries fell in August to its lowest since October 2022, when there was intense bond market turmoil after Truss’s budget plans.Mortgage lender Halifax said house prices in August were 4.6% lower than a year earlier, the sharpest drop in 14 years. More

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