OECD: UK Set for Highest Level of Inflation in G7

This morning the BRC Like-For-Like Retail Sales beat expectations though eased for the second consecutive month as the cost of living continues to impact consumer spending. Against the forecasted 1.2% level, retail sales rose 1.4% on an annualised basis, dropping from last month’s print of 1.9%. Today’s print also marks the lowest level in fifteen months as weak consumer demand fed into lower levels of spending, along with the BRC citing poor weather putting off shoppers.

China’s stock market has traded positively today, as authorities there are trying to talk a very good game when it comes to stabilisation. The government’s plan is to “guide institutional investors…to enter the market with greater effort” – this can be loosely translated to “state owned and backed funds and companies will buy what they’re told, when they’re told, in however much they’re told”!

The news was enough to send the market higher by 3.5% and it’s hoped that this will now be enough to stabilise the market as we get into the holidays at the end of this week – though lighter trading volumes as we get closer to the weekend will mean less capacity to absorb any shocks if we do get any last-minute jitters.

Other good news for China is that they’re apparently set to build ‘next generation’ smartphone semiconductors, despite US efforts to slow down their access to the manufacturing technology. SMIC is the country’s largest chip manufacturer and they’re set to make a Huawei designed microprocessor that has a distance between transistors of just five nanometres, meaning that in just one square millimetre a chip can have 125-300 million transistors on it!

This is important because it takes this kind of computing power to process the amount of data that Artificial Intelligence’s Large Language Models consume and with these developments it seems that China has narrowed the gap between themselves and market leader Nvidia and this kind of success is likely to lead to China doubling down on the development, despite the eye-watering cost of chip manufacturing infrastructure, and the still limited access to the kit that it needs from the West. The FT has the story, click here to read.