US manufacturing data pushes FTSE higher

It didn't take much to inject some life into the stock market – just a mildly encouraging piece of data from the US manufacturing sector. We'll see how long the enthusiasm lasts. Andrew Lapthorne, who crunches numbers for Société Générale, reckons consensus forecasts for corporate earnings are "out of kilter with economic reality". He has a point: sales growth is forecast to be 7% globally and profit margins, already at historical highs, are reckoned to rise a further 7%. Neither seems very likely to happen. Maybe investors don't believe the analysts and have taken account of their optimism already. But earnings downgrades, assuming they arrive eventually, don't usually inspire confidence.