The unemployment figures came out on Thursday and showed a better-than-expected improvement, with the rate now the lowest since December 2010.

Home sellers are finally growing in confidence, judging by a survey by Rightmove of more than 100,000 asking prices across the country.

Property asking prices have neared their pre-crisis peaks, according to the latest RightMove House Price Survey, published today.

The number of new City jobs trebled last month, but only against December’s count which was the lowest since the financial crisis began in 2008.

The number of new City jobs trebled last month but only against December's count which was the lowest since the financial crisis began in 2008.

The first float of a UK company this year cheered the City yesterday as housebuilder Crest Nicholson unveiled plans for a £500m return to the stock market.

If you're lacking in inspiration, go and chat to the students of Featherstone Sixth Form in Southall, like I did last Friday. They will shatter any clichéd prejudices about an apathetic X-Factor generation who stare blankly when politics is even mentioned. These bright young women and men were full of excitement and eloquence as they discussed their futures, as well as those of Britain and the world; and they were full of fury and frustration about the fact their generation was the first to face being poorer than their parents since Berlin fell to the Allies.

The chief of the new Financial Conduct Authority smells blood

Time to bank on virtue as the market cult collapses

NYSE Euronext has hired Patrick Birley, the former head of clearing company LCH.Clearnet, as chief commercial officer at its London-based clearing house, which the exchange plans to open next June.

A Parliamentary inquiry into the performance of the Bank of England during the financial crisis should be ordered immediately, MPs said last night, after the Bank's Governor Sir Mervyn King made the surprise statement that he would be happy to co-operate with such a probe.

It's up to the Labour leader to offer the country a coherent Plan B

Those of us who imagined that the perfect lives in The Truman Show constituted a glimpse of the future could have no better reality check than The Near and the Elsewhere, a potent exhibition of visual artworks at the PM Gallery at Pitzhanger Manor, Ealing, London. These unsettling freeze-frames – by turns surreal, mysterious, or coruscatingly depressing – are like slides from some urban-cum-architectural pathology lab.

If you were seeking an accountant, would you hire one that has just blown a £12m black hole in its own accounts? RSM Tenon, the number crunchers with the dodgy calculator, said yesterday that a review of the group's finances had revealed "significant errors".