james bevan will stick around with us.will bring you special coverage of the french presidential election. the runoff sunday. we had rate coverage at around one. we will wrap it up around two. an exclusive interview with the finance minister of south africa. he will be joining us at 8:30 u.k. time. while we will talk about the fed not budging on its balance sheet policy. the former chairman says shrinking the holding will take four to five years. we will have more on that interview that he delivered yesterday for bloomberg, and next. ♪ guy: 12 minutes past the hour. welcome back, you are watching the european open. equities reasonably well bit across the region. a few ex-dividend out there. trading higher and hsbc is definitely trading higher this morning. 72.72 is where we are trading in london. big cap movers. nejra cehic, over to you. nejra: quite a bit of focus on minors, particularly after what happened in the asian session. we are looking at gold. first quarter gold production up 10% year on year. shareholders approv

still with us, james bevan, chief investment officer at ccla investment management and peter dixon fromommerzbank. james, do you believe equities are now fully priced? >> i was talking about 2400 as a year and target for s&p 500. we are at 2400 already. we are very dependent on mr. trump delivering on deregulation and cutting taxes. francine: where do we go from here? correction, or where does it go next? >> low growth, low interest rates. people will pay very high prices to participate in equities. if you really believe in zero interest rates, you should pay 100 times for the earnings. you need to but risk into the equation. if we believe the u.s. economy is thecover, the 2700 upper limit. francine: peter, are we feeling a lot better about the world economy? is growth, for the first time in a long time, upgraded? >> from a european perspective, we are a lot more comfortable. we are on slightly more solid footing. my sense is, we are nine years on from the financial crash in 2008. it normally takes that time for the economy to find a bit more momentum after that crash. we are getting th

james bevan has returned. volkswagen is in the news again.re in the papers talking about a us turn around plan? it is a very grand plan indeed. they are saying they're going to get costs down and productivity up and they want margins of a% by 2020 and in 2020 they're going to shift focus into becoming dominant in electric vehicles over the period that then follows to 2025. that's a big ask. yes, they have got their work cut out anyway, image wise after the emissions scandal? what they have done well is launch sports utility vehicles, popular in the american markets so they have been increasing sales and we learnt that from the numbers last week. i guess they're trying to ride the popular, enthusiasm that's been engendered. let's look at the consumer spending story. this is uk spending consuming spending dipping. online is dipping because people have been spending on things like chocolate and hot cross buns and leisure. but there is a bigger issue here which is that we are having higher import prices, poor wage growth and since brexit, the con

let's get detailed analysis of all these stories from james bevan, chief investment officer at ccla investmentyear? it's not really an election issue at the moment. do you think it could be?” think the election will come too soon think the election will come too soon for it to begin to colour the minds of investors. it is however, very clear that households are finding it very difficult to expand their standards of living, let alone have an expectation of the materially better tomorrow. and this obviously all comes back to the premise that the one—off benefit of the currency devaluation is now beginning to show up in higher prices and that's going to be a real hit. do you think anyone will be able to do anything about it? it is all to do with productivity, isn't it and companies being able to make enough money to pay people more? yes and there is a disturbing trend for people with jobs that machines and robots are taking over and there is less job creation than in robots are taking over and there is lessjob creation than in prior big expansions. let's talk about 888. this is part of a wider tr