FTSE Friday: Climate concerns and Diageo's rum punch

After Terry Smith re-opened Mayonnaise-gate in his annual Fundsmith letter last week, Alan Jope (the boss at Unilever, which is the company under fire from Smith) has claimed this week’s best soundbite: “we’re at peak inflation, not peak prices,” he told an audience at the World Economic Forum on Tuesday.
The first part of his statement is correct or incorrect depending on which inflation metric you use. In December, CPI retreated for the second consecutive month on falling energy prices, but Core CPI (which excludes food and fuel) rose back up to its October levels and wage inflation hit a new high of 6.4%. And so, while the price inflation of goods might have stabilised, service inflation looks like it might have further to run. This week stocks wobbled as investors priced in the likelihood of a 0.5% increase in interest rates when the Bank of England meets again in February.
But final quarter trading statements from some of Britain’s biggest businesses continue to provide respite from the gloom of the economic situation. This week we’ll be looking at the announcements from:

Diageo - which has made another big acquisition
Pearson - where turnaround plans continue to look good

Diageo hopes rum can become its...