Investors here will pay close attention to minutes from the last meeting of Bank of England (BoE) policymakers, looking for clues to future interest rate movements. The FTSE 100 index of leading London Stock Exchange shares fell 13.7 points or 0.22 percent over the past week and ended at 6,291.20 on Friday.
The BoE on Wednesday will make public the minutes of a meeting earlier this month that left the bank's benchmark interest rate unchanged at 5.75 percent, where it has been since July.
In October only one of the BoE's nine monetary policy committee members, David Blanchflower, voted for a rate reduction. Investors will use the minutes from the November session to try to predict the date of the next rate cut. A bank report on inflation issued last Wednesday was interpreted as a sign that the next reduction would come early next year.
The market will also be monitoring brewer Scottish and Newcastle, which on two occasions has spurned take-over offers - now worth more than 10 billion euros (14.6 billion dollars) - from Carlsberg of Denmark and Heineken of The Netherlands.
Scottish and Newcastle, along with budget airline EasyJet, is scheduled to report its results on Tuesday. Another document due Tuesday, the Walker Report, will examine the role of investment funds in corporate take-overs, which has sparked controversy in financial circles.
On Friday the national statistics office is expected to confirm robust third quarter British economic growth of 0.8 percent compared with the second quarter and 3.3 percent for the year.
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