Rolling coverage of the latest economic and financial news, as the London stock market closes for Christmas
- Latest: index of medium-sized firms hits 10-month high
- Banks and housebuilders rally on deal hopes
- Introduction: Pound rises in early trading
- Sterling traded at $1.36 this morning.
- Politics Live: Boris Johnson poised to announce UK and EU have reached agreement
The US stock market has opened rather quietly, on a shortened trading day before Christmas.
The Dow Jones industrial average has risen 67 points, or 0.2%, to 30,197, as investors shrug off Donald Trump’s decision to veto a $740bn defence spending bill.
Related: Trump vetoes huge US defense spending bill but Congress set to override
The latest word on the elusive trade deal is that the negotiations have been delayed because the European commission was using the wrong fish figures.
Our Politics Live blog explains:
The final stage of the negotiations for a post-Brexit trade deal has been delayed after it emerged that the European commission was using out-of-date figures to calculate the reduction in the amount of fish that member states can catch in British waters after 1 January.
A deal was due to be announced early this morning but the announcement had to be postponed when officials noticed a discrepancy between two sets of fishing figures and realised that the numbers used in the negotiation appeared to be out of date.
The delay on Brexit seems to be that some of the baseline fish figures the EU shared with member states don't tally with those negotiated in the room with the UK, so there is now an effort to ensure the two sets of numbers tally and everyone is talking about the same thing
“Nothing is agreed until everything is agreed” Yes, this is the truism that has governed these negotiations from the start.. But – as one EU diplomat mentioned in passing – they could have started counting the mackerel a few days earlier .. #Brexit