The striking thing from this morning's insolvency statistics was that company failures in England and Wales in the fourth quarter, 4,566, were down by 1.7% on the third quarter and by 1.1% on a year earlier. Normally company liquidations lag the cycle, so there could still be worse to come.

Individual insolvencies continued to rise, hitting a record 35,374 in the fourth quarter, up by 24.9% on a year earlier but a modest 0.9% compared with the third quarter. More here.

Producer price inflation in January rose to 3.8%, or 2.5% on a core basis, for output prices, and went up from 7.4% to 8.4% on input prices.