Daily Telegraph: "Retail sales suffer biggest fall in nine months"

Link to Daily Telegraph

"Retail sales volumes fell by a larger-than-expected 0.8pc between January and February, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) said."

"... Samuel Tombs of Capital Economics said: 

"February's UK retail sales figures leave the recovery on the High Street looking a bit more fragile than it previously seemed ...

So, with yesterday's Budget doing little to ease the burden of the next round of austerity measures due to hit households in April, the high street recovery looks set to be short-lived again."

"What the papers say"

'More pain than gain', an 'audacious gamble' and 'Gran Theft Auto'.

Here's what the papers have been saying about this year's Budget.

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Link to The Guardian

The Guardian: Budget 2012

"... Osborne says the economy was in a benighted state back in 2010, and has since had to cope with the rolling crisis in the eurozone and the sharp increase in oil prices. While the government's shock treatment has clearly not helped, the chancellor is right when he says manufacturing was woefully neglected by the last government, at least until its dying days. He is also right to point out that growth in the boom years was heavily dependent on speculation in the City of London and the housing market, which generated – for a while – the revenues for higher public spending. 

" Those days are now over, and unless the UK can pull its socks up, according to Osborne, it faces becoming a global also-ran. That seems a fair assessment also. With its weak growth, high youth unemployment and industrial wastelands, the UK bears the hallmarks of a country in long-term structural decline."