The UK’s trade deficit in goods and services widened by £2.3bn between February and March 2017 to £4.9bn, the Office for National Statistics says, external.

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The FTSE 100 is flat at 7378 points ahead of the Bank of England's midday interest rate decision and inflation forecast.

BT shares are down about 1.4% after the telecoms giant's annual results.

BT said it would cut 4,000 jobs in its Global Services unit and scale back its dividend growth ambitions in a drive to recover from an accounting scandal and a profit warning. 

Image source, Reuters

According to Labour's leaked draft election manifesto, the party wants to promise to renationalise the UK's railways.

BBC transport correspondent Richard Westcott says there's a YouGov poll - which you can see here, external - that is a "couple of years old but [shows] renationalising trains always polls well".

The bombshell is that the majority of people want railways to be accountable to taxpayers rather than shareholders. Who'd have thought it?

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BT has had a pretty torrid time of late, and now will axe 4,000 jobs.

Guy Peddy of investment bank Macquarie says: "Effectively they are starting to shrink the business, they're not going to be so asset rich in some of these international businesses, they're going to... borrow and use wholesale products to get network access - that just means you don't need as many people... They've got themselves very geographically diversified... [in 180 countries] and in a lot of those countries you do not need to be in the scale that they are."

Image source, Adidas

German sportswear maker Adidas has managed to sell its troubled golf equipment and clothing brands TaylorMade, Adams Golf and Ashworth.

It sold the loss-making businesses to private equity firm KPS Capital Partners.

Adidas has been looking for a buyer for the brands, which represent about 60% of its golf unit, at least since May last year.

Image source, Getty Images

Away from BT's woes today, Japanese car maker Nissan has forecast a 7.7% fall in operating profit this year due to higher raw materials costs.

To add to BT's woes today, it reported fourth quarter profit before tax down 48% at £440m after taking a charge of £342m related to an Ofcom fine.

The fine itself was £42m for breaching telecoms contracts, but BT set aside a further £300m to compensate providers.

BT said the costs of investigating its Italian accounting scandal were £15m, and it also increased provision for "other historical matters" by £58m.

Some more on those 4,000 BT jobs that are to be cut.

The job losses will be all round the world, with the majority in global services.

They will include jobs in its head office, and roles in what BT calls "group functions" which includes HR, finance, procurement and supply chain.

The BBC understands that BT is going to become less dependent on physical locations and use more cloud-based services - i.e. using big datacentres which don't necessarily have to be in the country where the services they provide are sold. 

But BT said it had added more than 2,200 roles in its UK and Ireland call centres this year, and it said it wanted to recruit 1,500 trainee engineers by the end of October.

Dominic O'Connell
Business Presenter, BBC Radio 4 Today programme

Radio 5 live's Sean Farrington has some figures on BT boss Gavin Patterson's not getting a bonus. It follows an Italian accounting scandal last year and a warning about BT's outlook for UK public sector contracts. 

BT is to cut 4,000 back-office and managerial roles over the next two years.

It's part of a big shake-up of its Global Services division, which provides telecom and IT services to big corporate and public sector customers.

The shake-up comes after a review that was set in motion after a big accounting scandal at the Italian part of Global Services.

Luis Alvarez, the head of Global Services, who was a rising star at BT and tipped one day perhaps to be chief executive, is leaving - as they say by mutual agreement.

Image source, PA

The chief financial officer of baby goods retailer Mothercare, which is trying to revamp its business, has handed in his resignation.

Richard Smothers will stay until a successor can be found, the company said, external.

"Richard has played a significant role in the first phase of the turnaround of the Mothercare brand, helping us to build a strong platform for future growth," Mothercare chief executive, Mark Newton-Jones, said. 

BT's group chief executive Gavin Patterson and outgoing finance director Tony Chanmugam will not receive a bonus for the 2016/2017 financial year, the telecoms giant has announced, external.

BT remuneration committee chairman, Tony Ball, said: "The past year has been challenging."

Problems included accounting irregularities in BT's Italian business and challenges with UK public sector contracts, he said.

"The committee has made a number of difficult decisions this year in light of these circumstances and exercised its discretion accordingly."

Image source, Getty Images

So why is Snapchat doing poorly? 

The BBC's North America tech reporter Dave Lee says: "A few years back [Facebook boss] Mark Zuckerberg tried to buy Snapchat for a couple of billion dollars, and Snapchat said 'No, go away, we're not interested', and it seems that since then Mark Zuckerberg has been hellbent on making sure Snapchat isn't a success. 

"That's ramped up in the last eight or nine months. Features have appeared on Instagram, which is an app that's... owned by Facebook, that are so similar to Snapchat's main features that it's become a bit of an industry joke."

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Snapchat's owner reported disappointing growth in the first three months of the year, and net loss soared to $2.2bn from $104.6m.

In its first results since floating, Snap said the number of daily active users rose just 5% to 166 million compared with the last three months of 2016.

BBC North America technology reporter Dave Lee says there were already some worries behind the much-hyped stock market listing:

"It came to the market with great expectations, but also with great concern... there were worries it wouldn't be able to grow quickly enough to keep investors happy, and against other competition, like Facebook in particular, it was going to struggle to get the kind of attention and advertising revenue it needed."

Image source, Reuters

A recovery in oil prices led to a buying spree for energy-related shares, giving Asian markets a boost in Thursday's session. 

Brent crude, the international benchmark, is back above $50 a barrel after oil prices were boosted by a big fall in US oil stockpiles and support from Iraq and Algeria for an extension to Opec supply cuts. 

Japan's Nikkei 225 index is up by 0.3%. 

Hong Kong's Hang Seng index has gained by 0.4%. 

Over in China, though, the Shanghai composite is down by more than 1% on worries of tougher financial regulations to come.   

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The Bank of England governor Mark Carney has to give a public update on the economy just before a general election.

Mr Carney was criticised in the run-up to and after the EU referendum for being overly political, so the timing of today's inflation report and interest rate decision probably couldn't be much worse for him.

Lucy O'Carroll, chief economist of Aberdeen Asset Management, says:

"We expect him to possibly downgrade the growth outlook for this year a little bit, probably not too much beyond 2017 on that, possibly boost up the inflation forecast... talk about the uncertainties in the economic outlook, and try to avoid saying anything that can be construed as political."