The stock market perceived few surprises in what was generally seen as the last budget before the general election. The FTSE 100 moved in response to Mr Gordon Brown's speech, showing a fractional decline down 0.4 at 6,011.6 and reacted to the emergence of the news items with mostly flashes of red which took the index down just over 22 points.
Towards the tail end of the speech which, unusually, finished before the market closed, the index began to rally, before slipping back again. It managed to finish the session just above the 6,000 mark, closing 10.2 off at 6,001.8. Over the previous two sessions the index had rallied 153.4 points, or 2.6 per cent.
The freeze on duty on spirits, wine and beer, which was a mild surprise, was described by cynics as `blatant electioneering'. The abolition of betting duty, another populist move, had been well flagged some weeks ago.
The other main indices were little changed with the FTSE 250 up 6.6 at 6,628.6 and the FTSE SmallCap 4.7 firmer at 3,190.5. The Techmark 100, the star of the stock market's two-day rally, finished with a modest 3.94 decline at 2,394.16. Another set of US profit warnings kept recent tech euphoria in check.
Wall Street played a significant part in the direction of London's equity market. Closing up 28 points on Tuesday, having been up 128 points at best, the Dow followed that performance with a three-figure gain at the start of US trading, only to fall back as London trading closed. The Nasdaq Composite, up 61 points overnight, struggled to remain in positive territory yesterday.
It was generally a mixed showing by the FTSE 100 constituents with the recently buoyant TMT (technology, media and telecom) sector featuring in both the winners and losers lists, but with the most influential stocks, especially Vodafone, on the downside. The latter alone accounted for 16 FTSE 100 points.
On the upside the oils continued to gain ground, on prospects of further drawdowns in US petroleum stocks and another cut in Opec output after the March 16 meeting in Vienna.
Turnover in equities was 1.95 billion shares by the 6 p.m. count, with Vodafone accounting for almost a third, at 629 million shares.
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