The pound jumped and shares in Britain’s biggest companies soared Friday as Boris Johnson’s crushing victory in the British general election on Thursday removed doubts about whether the U.K. would actually ever leave the European Union.
For good measure, it effectively silenced talk that transport, energy and telecommunications companies in the U.K. would be nationalized, a big plank of the opposition Labour Party’s platform.
The pound, which had slumped after Britons voted to leave the European Union in 2016, leapt by about 2% against the euro and the U.S. dollar as it became clearer that the big Conservative victory would likely end years of political deadlock over how or whether to implement the referendum result.
Markets also breathed a sigh of relief that the centre-right Conservatives had defeated Jeremy Corbyn’s left-wing Labour Party which had proposed a sweeping programme of nationalization and a huge increase in public spending, partly financed by tax increases on companies and higher earners.
And it wasn’t just markets in London. Shares were higher across the continent and as far east as Tokyo, Shanghai and Hong Kong.
The decisive result added further fuel to the euphoria that has driven global stock markets to record highs in the past 24 hours after U.S. President Donald Trump tweeted that Washington was “very close” to a trade deal with Beijing that would end a damaging trade war.
Chris Beauchamp, chief market analyst at U.K.-based online trading firm IG, said that, from a market perspective, the election result was “immensely positive.”
“It removes a lot of uncertainty, at least in the near term, about where we go from here,” he told Fortune, although he cautioned that there remained “a huge amount of work to be done in terms of the next stage of the Brexit deal.”
“Markets are glad to see that the potential of a Corbyn government has been banished, it looks like permanently. And we have a solid government with a solid majority that is now finally able to get on with its will,” Beauchamp said.
Bonds and bluechips soar
British government bond yields climbed to their highest in six months following the election result, signalling hopes for a stronger economy. Overall, the FTSE-100 index of leading British stocks was up 1.8%.
British prime minister Johnson, who previously headed a minority government, now has a big majority of 78 seats in parliament which guarantees that he will be able to keep his promise to win approval by the end of January for a draft deal to leave the EU.
He still has to negotiate Britain’s future trading relationship with the EU. That’s no small matter. It could take months or even years to resolve, but at least the election result ends the uncertainty over Britain’s next move. The uncertainty had paralyzed investment in the country.
Johnson’s victory also opens the prospect of a new U.S.-U.K. free trade agreement. Tweeting his congratulations to Johnson Friday, Trump said “Britain and the United States will now be free to strike a massive new trade deal after Brexit.”
Shares of companies whose businesses are principally focused on the U.K. economy soared, as did energy, water and transport companies that the opposition Labour Party had pledged to nationalize if they had won the election, rolling back a wave of privatizations begun under former Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s.
Shares in Centrica, which owns British Gas, Britain’s biggest energy supplier, rose about 8%. SSE, another of Britain’s “big six” energy firms, saw its shares rise by more than 9%, as did water supplier United Utilities.
Shares in Royal Mail, also singled out for nationalization if Corbyn had won the vote, rose nearly 7%.
Shares in telecoms group BT rose nearly 8% as investors breathed a sigh of relief as the risk to part of its business evaporated. The Labour Party had promised to nationalize BT’s broadband network as part of its plan to provide free internet for everyone. The initiative would have been partly financed by a tax on internet firms such as Google, Amazon and Facebook.
Housebuilders were also up strongly because the Conservatives have promised to build one million new homes to tackle a housing shortage. The top four risers on the FTSE-100 index were housebuilders Taylor Wimpey, Berkeley, Barratt Developments and Persimmon, their shares all rising by more than 11%.
Shares in transport firm Stagecoach were up 14%. Labour had pledged to nationalize train and bus operators.
Banks also performed strongly, boosted by hopes of a stronger U.K. economy, with Royal Bank of Scotland shares up 11% and Barclays and Lloyds both up 8%.
Labour had also promised to levy a windfall tax on oil companies. Shares in BP and Royal Dutch Shell, however, were little changed.
The biggest losers
Losers included companies that earn a lot of their revenues in foreign currencies, and are therefore hit by a stronger pound. These included shares in companies like drugmaker GlaxoSmithKline and Reckitt Benckiser, although their shares were down only slightly.
Corbyn’s Labour Party had also pledged to give employees ownership of 10% of large companies, and to embark on a program of heavy government spending to reverse years of austerity in the U.K. since the financial crisis, partly financed by a rise in taxes on companies.
Johnson has also pledged to open the government spending taps, but to a much lesser extent.
His spending priorities include extra funding for the state-run National Health Service, which will hire tens of thousands more nurses and build new hospitals, adding 20,000 more police and making the country carbon-neutral by 2050.
In his victory speech Friday, Johnson pledged “colossal new investments in infrastructure and science.”
Political uncertainty will still hang over Britain’s future though because the Scottish National Party made strong gains in Scotland, reinforcing its calls for another referendum on Scottish independence from Britain.
Meanwhile, economic growth in the U.K. has been anaemic since the Brexit referendum, as has business investment. Even with the markets soaring on Friday, the Berlin-based ratings agency Scope Ratings, said it is only forecasting 1.2% economic growth for the U.K. in 2020, identical to the growth rate it expects for 2019. “That’s not exactly impressive,” Dennis Shen, a director in sovereign ratings at Scope Ratings, told Fortune.
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