The blahs seem to have taken firm hold of the industrial metals, with yesterday being a day of little change, just like Monday.

Sometimes when you’re scouring the news, you see a statistic that renders you almost speechless. You can’t quite get your head around what it really means, you just know that it’s a knockout number.

At the launch party for the Spectator’s business magazine, a banker introduced himself to me. He’d been wanting to meet me for ages, he said.

Inflation finally appears to be making a comeback in Japan. Excluding food, it rose to an annual rate of 1.2% in March, a ten-year high, while consumer prices excluding food and energy rose by 0.1% year-on-year, the first positive number since 1998.