British customers remain calm

UK customers generally neglected fears about an impending Brexit deadline. As a result, they spent a lot this month, as official data revealed on Thursday.

As a matter of fact, in annual terms, retail sales volumes managed to jump by the most for two-and-a-half years, soaring by 6.7%, as the Office for National Statistics informed.

The given outcome surpassed all estimates in a Reuters survey of experts.

As ONS officials told, the jump in part reflected the peak of spending in 2018, when the United Kingdom was affected by a series of snowstorms as well as icy weather.

This year, warm weather in March really assisted to ramp up spending of UK customers on clothing.

Sales went up by 1.1% in monthly terms, thus confounding the median estimate of a 0.3% dive in the Reuters survey.

For the first three months of this year, a smoother outcome of spending patterns, sales headed north by 1.6% in contrast with the previous three months, which appears to be the strongest jump since August last year.

The United Kingdom was originally due to depart from the European bloc on March 29, although that deadline was pushed back to April 12 and after this again to October 31 due to the fact UK Prime Minister Theresa May didn’t manage to break an impasse in the British legislative body on the terms of Brexit.

By the way, the figures uncovered on Thursday by the ONS covered the period February 24- March 30.

Additionally, consumer spending has underpinned the British economy through the Brexit downtime, in steep contrast to businesses that have cut back on investment.

The Bank of England has forecast the slowest economic surge for a decade in 2019.

gbp geopolitics economy