You can read more reaction and analysis on our budget live blog:

And here are the key points at a glance:

One of the main budget announcements was a new digital services tax, on tech giants such as Google (but not start-ups). It will come into effect in April 2020 and will raise £400m a year, the chancellor said. Digital tech giants will be taxed 2% on the money they make from UK users.

Stella Amiss, head of tax policy at PricewaterhouseCoopers, said:

The chancellor’s strong words of recent months were no bluff. At home, the confirmation of a new digital services tax was trailed as a step towards levelling the playing field between online retailers and the high street. But it is much more than that. Working out who is taxed and who isn’t in the digital economy is no mean feat when all businesses operate in an increasing technological world.

It’s no surprise then that the chancellor has approached this with caution - a narrowly targeted regime, a 2% rate, and an effective implementation date pushed back to 2020. This new tax is well and truly aimed at the tech giants and not the online retailers so will do little to address the woes of bricks and mortar retailers and could well be perceived across the pond as an anti-American measure that could come back to bite us as the UK looks to move to trade talks after the Brexit deadline.

Duty on beer, cider and spirits has been frozen for a year – while wine wasn’t spared, with duty going up in line with inflation.

The Wine and Spirit Trade Association was quick to respond. Its chief executive Miles Beale welcomed the government’s decision to freeze duty on spirits, but deplored the increase in wine duty.

The decision by the chancellor to increase wine rates significantly is a hammer blow to this great British industry. It actively undermines a sector that has been hardest hit since the Brexit Referendum and will be thoroughly unwelcome for the 33 million consumers of the nation’s most popular alcoholic drink.

This inflationary rise is grossly unfair, unjustified and counter-productive. The UK is the world’s biggest wine trading nation and, as such, deserves government’s support, not punishment.

The wine industry is, unfortunately, no stranger to harsh treatment from chancellors. Since 2012 wine overtook beer as the largest contributor to the public purse through duty payments, and no alcoholic drink has paid more to the Treasury since then.

The chancellor has pledged a £675m high street fund and business rates to be cut by a third to help embattled high street retailers.

Paul Clement, head of place shaping at property group Savills, says:

We are very pleased that the chancellor has recognised the need to extend an essential lifeline to the British high street. Business rate relief alongside a new fund for local authorities to redevelop and transform town centres are just some of the key recommendations made by Savills as part of the evidence submitted to the Housing Communities and Local Government Committee’s (HCLGC) latest government inquiry. Creating places where people want, rather than need to be, can only be achieved through this kind of systemic change.

Earlier, Hammond said we are at a “pivotal moment” in the Brexit talks. If we get it right, there will be a “double Brexit dividend”. More investment, currently on hold, will come on stream, and the Treasury will no longer have to hold back money.

But the chancellor also said he was increasing the amount of spending for no deal planning to £2bn. Markets shrugged off the comments...

As to whether the budget commitments are funded whether there is a Brexit deal or not, as No. 10 said today, the chancellor suggested the opposite yesterday.

The new UK growth forecasts from the Office for Budget Responsibility, announced by Philip Hammond in his budget speech a few minutes ago, are higher than in March but still dismal.

Paul Johnson, director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, tweeted:

The speech has had little impact on markets so far. The FTSE 100 index is about 105 points ahead at 7045.42, a 1.5% gain. The pound still 0.2% lower against the dollar at $1.2805, and flat against the euro at €1.1242.

In other news, easyJet now expects to be flying electric plans by 2030, pushing back its forecast from 2027, but expressed confidence about a technology that is expected to cut the energy costs of a plane by 30%.

The low-cost carrier’s chief executive Johan Lundgren told Reuters:

We can definitely see a way forward in how we will get this aircraft into the fleet.

EasyJet has a partnership with US start-up Wright Electric, which is working on an electric engine for a nine-seater plane that will fly next year, following success with a two-seater, and will also start working on a 50-seater version. The goal is to build battery-propelled aircraft for flights of less than two hours.

More importantly, the chancellor has echoed Theresa May’s comments that “the era of austerity is finally coming to an end”.

You can follow the budget speech more closely at our budget live blog:

Hammond says the last time a UK budget was presented on a Monday was in 1962, when he was six. He recalls that his parents turned to him and said: “Philip, one day that could be you.”

And we are off. Philip Hammond has started his budget speech.

Poland’s foreign minister Jacek Czaputowicz said today that Merkel plays an important role in stabilising the European Union, and expressed support for her to stay on as chancellor.

Merkel’s decision not to seek re-election as CDU party chairwoman which means her fourth term as chancellor will be her last heralds the end of an era in which she has dominated European politics. She became Germany’s chancellor in 2005.

The race for a successor to Merkel at the top of the CDU has already started. This morning, three candidates announced their ambitions:

• Party secretary-general Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer
• Health minister Jens Spahn
• Former parliamentary leader when Merkel started as party chair, Friedrich Merz

Carsten Brzeski, chief economist at ING Germany, says the key question is will the new CDU leader move to the political right again or continue Merkel’s strategy of capturing the political centre.

Merkel’s announcement remains less of a risk for the German government than the SPD’s losses in the last elections. The CDU has no interest in Merkel stepping down as chancellor or a snap election before any successor has been able to build up a profile. The SPD, however, remains in an existential crisis which could easily lead to the decision to leave the coalition next year.

As historic as today’s announcement is, the approaching end of an era also holds the potential for positive developments. Not so much because new is always better but rather because it could give Merkel the freedom and the tailwind - freed from party ties - to put a final stamp on her legacy, possibly with bolder steps to reform the German economy and the monetary union.

Three years of a lame duck government would clearly be harmful, not only for Europe but also for Germany. Somehow, the announced end is typical for the entire era Merkel: unpretentiously pulling the strings.

Stefan Koopman, market economist at Rabobank, notes that after the initial shock caused by Merkel’s announcement, the market reaction has been relatively muted as she also said she would like to see her term through to 2021.

The CDU is suffering heavy losses in state elections and the opinion polls indicate there is no improvement in sight. It will now be increasingly difficult for her to stay on as Chancellor, and having shown signs of weakness, the wolves may come for her sooner rather than later.

Germany has been a cradle of political stability over the last decade, but this now looks to be over. Ms Merkel has been a driving force in Europe, leading the response to major political and economic upheaval like the Eurozone debt crisis. What now remains to be seen is whether her CDU successor has the political will and gravitas on the European stage to hold it together in these testing times.

With Brexit imminent and growing controversy around the Italian government’s spending plans, there couldn’t be a worse time for Germany’s steady ship to hit choppy waters. This implies more financial market volatility going forward and is another reason to remain bearish about the euro.

On Wall Street, the Dow Jones climbed about 200 points at the open to 24,922.34, a gain of almost 1%.

Wall Street is also expected to rally when trading begins shortly.....

Elsewhere in the eurozone, Italy’s stock market is flying after S&P left the country’s credit rating unchanged on Friday night.

The FTSE MIB has leapt by 2.5%, and Italian government bonds are also rallying.

European stock markets are all showing gains this morning.

Bank stocks are up, following HSBC’s strong results, along with healthcare groups and industrial companies.

Last week the US stock markets fell into correction territory, after several heavyweight companies posted disappointing results:

David Madden, market analyst at CMC Markets, says last week was grim:

Global stock markets had a terrible time last week as investor sentiment continued to sour. Concerns about higher interest rates in the US, along with political uncertainty in Italy as well as geopolitical concerns played on investors’ minds. Last week, Amazon and Alphabet both released quarterly figures and the revenue components missed market estimates and that added to the decline. The major US indices enjoyed a positive run over the summer, and there was a sense that valuations were lofty, particularly for the tech sector.

The S&P 500 is now in correction territory, which means it had fallen more than 10% from the recent peak, and this underlines how large the correction has been. The Shanghai Composite lost over 2% overnight after China confirmed that industrial profit fell for the fifth straight month.

Financial blogger Jeroen Blokland says a range of factors have hurt the markets this month. However, that doesn’t mean we’re facing a repeat of the 2008 crisis.

He writes:

This chart by Bloomberg shows that global equities have lost almost USD 8 trillion in market cap in October, the worst sell-off since 2008. However, the absolute numbers can be deceptive as the total market capitalization has increased by roughly 50% since start of the financial crisis.

But more importantly, while there are definitely a number of factors that are negatively impacting markets (China-US trade war, rising geopolitical risk, Italy’s massive debt pile – to name just a few), current economic circumstances make it less likely that a crisis like the one in in 2008 will happen now. Of course, things could change quickly, especially if market sentiment remains as depressed as it is now, but this might be a good moment to take a step back and refocus on the fundamentals.

Today’s losses in China suggest markets have further to fall, warns Hussein Sayed, chief market strategist at foreign exchange broker FXTM:

The steep sell-off in U.S. equity markets suggests October could be the worst month since the global financial crisis of 2008. Seven trillion dollars have already been wiped from the global market cap, and still there are no signs of bulls returning.

Chinese stocks fell today with the CSI 300 declining more than 3% while the Yuan remained trading near a decade low. The Nikkei 225 gave up gains of more than 1% to trade in negative territory. Moving against the trend were stocks in Australia, with the ASX 200 gaining more than 1% supported by the healthcare and telecom sectors.

The bears seem well in control of the market and there’re many reasons to justify their actions. Whether it’s weakening global economic growth, the ongoing U.S.-China trade war, monetary policy tightening, fears of a hard Brexit, Italy’s budget woes… and the list goes on. What is more interesting is that investors are even punishing companies that have reported positive earnings surprises.