Here are the top stories we'll be watching this week.
All eyes will be on the Bank of England's meeting
on interest rates against the backdrop of Brexit.
EU forecasts will reveal more about the slowing eurozone
economy.
Google's own Alphabet brings out its latest figures,
and investors will be focused on YouTube's fortunes.
And Pope Francis makes the first trip
by the head of the Catholic church to the Arabian peninsula
when he visits the United Arab Emirates.
First to the UK and rate decision time.
Brexit dominates all political and economic debate in Britain
at the moment, with a looming deadline
of March 29 for leaving the EU.
In these circumstances, the Bank of England
is all but guaranteed to leave interest rates
unchanged at 0.75% when it next announces
its decision this Thursday.
The interest in the bank's meeting
is whether the Governor Mark Carney gives any hints
about the balance of thinking on his monetary policy committee
if Brexit uncertainties disappear over the next three
months.
You've got on the horizon the big Brexit
deadline of the 29th of March this year
when, if nothing else happens, Britain crashes out of the EU.
Now if that were to happen, I think
that'll be one thing on the Bank of England's mind.
What would they then do?
They've put out a whole bunch of documents
suggesting that they might even have
to raise interest rates if the pound plummeted
and inflation went up very strongly.
But I think it's much more likely to be the case
that, if we did crash out, then they
would cut interest rates quite quickly back to 0.5% or even
0.25% to try and give the economy a little bit
of a boost at a difficult time.
But they don't want to be talking about this at all.
They want to be talking about what they would do if there's
a transition deal and there's a smooth path for the UK economy.
And then they really want to be thinking
about when the next rise in interest rates is going to be.
With wages and the employment market doing very well,
they'd want that to be sooner rather than later.
But there's so much uncertainty in the UK at the moment
that no one really thinks they're
likely to raise interest rates until the back end
of this year, probably November.
Feeding into the bank's analysis will with the state
of the eurozone economy.
The European Commission publishes
its latest quarterly forecast for the area also on Thursday.
The single currency zone has hit a rough patch with growth
slowing dramatically in the second half of last year,
to its slowest pace in more than four years.
The eurozone economy is not looking in good shape.
We saw some weaknesses in the second half of last year.
And, at the time, people thought those weaknesses
were a temporary blip.
But it seems they're going to be more prolonged than initially
thought.
That has forced the European Central Bank in recent weeks
to downgrade its economic outlook for the coming years.
It says the risks to growth are no longer broadly balanced,
but instead they're tilted towards the downside.
Most of the weakness is on the back
of political uncertainty, which is affecting
things in the global economy.
It's making investors more cautious, for instance.
What we should get a sense of this week
is the degree to which the concerns of the ECB
are concerned by officials in Brussels
when the European Commission produces
its economic projections on Thursday.
Over to the US now, where tech giant Alphabet -
owner of Google and YouTube - reports its fourth-quarter
results on Monday.
And the big question for investors
is whether Alphabet can sustain its revenue growth rate.
Wall Street panicked in October last year
when it reported a deceleration in Google's advertising sales,
contributing to the broader sell off
among tech stocks in the latter part of 2018,
from which Alphabet shares are yet to fully recover.
We've seen research showing that YouTube audiences are growing,
and that they're spending more time watching videos there,
at the same time that Facebook is declining in many areas.
And YouTube has been a somewhat patchy area
for advertising growth over the last couple of years.
We had a big panic back in 2017 over brand safety.
And a lot of big advertisers pulled out
because they're worried about their advertising being
shown against unsavoury or unsafe videos.
That has started to change.
And a particular sign of that, we
saw AT&T, one of the big US mobile operators,
return to YouTube this month after almost two years away.
Counterbalancing that is Amazon, which
is pushing very hard into the advertising business that
has traditionally been Google's bread and butter.
And so the tension there is, as the big advertisers get bigger
in the online advertising world, whether Google
can hold onto its place at the top of the pile.
And in the Middle East, Pope Francis
makes the first visit by a head of the Catholic church
to the Arabian peninsula when he goes to the United Arab
Emirates.
Pope Francis visits UAE's capital Abu Dhabi this week
at the invitation of the Emirati crown prince,
part of a broad approach to show more openness
towards Christianity, and promote
a more tolerant image of Islam.
The pontiff has been keen to open up to other religions
since his election in 2013, with this trip marking
his seventh visit to a predominantly Muslim country
in pursuit of inter-religious peace.
And that's what the week ahead looks like from the Financial
Times in London.
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