London investors return to events closer to home next week, including British inflation data and Bank of England minutes, after significant eurozone and US news steered markets in recent days. London's benchmark FTSE 100 index of top share prices finished at 5,915.55 points on Friday, up 2.08 percent from a week earlier.
The market enjoyed a strong end to the week after the US Federal Reserve on Thursday unveiled fresh plans to stimulate the American economy. The FTSE 100 jumped 1.64 percent in value on Friday after the Fed said it would unleash a huge open-ended bond-buying programme aimed at kick-starting growth and boosting jobs in the world's largest economy.
After a two-day meeting, the policy committee of the central bank said it would start a third programme to purchase $40 billion (30.6 billion euros) a month in mortgage-backed bonds, known as quantitative easing (QE3).
The effect should spill through to the broader economy, pushing up the prices of homes, stocks, and other assets that, the Fed hopes, will make Americans feel more financially comfortable and begin spending.
London stocks also won a boost this week from German approval for a new firewall, clearing a key hurdle in solving the eurozone debt crisis.
Germany's Constitutional Court overturned a raft of legal challenges aimed at preventing President Joachim Gauck from signing the European Stability Mechanism (ESM) and fiscal pact that will act as a debt brake.
With the 500-billion-euro (645-billion-dollar) ESM in place and a beefed-up European Central Bank ready to intervene massively on the markets, the EU's crisis fighting machinery is taking shape, and has elicited positive response on markets where borrowing costs for weaker eurozone states continued to fall.
In Britain, which is not part of the eurozone, the big news was an announcement by arms maker BAE Systems that it was planning a tie-up with European aerospace giant EADS.
Next week, traders will focus on British inflation data for August on Tuesday, followed a day later by publication of minutes from the Bank of England's last monetary policy meeting. The end of the week sees the release of British retail sales data, which will provide clues as to the impact of the recent London Olympics on British consumer spending. Government public finances data will be released on Friday.
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