They want to see evidence that a coherent and rational group is now forming from an assembly of businesses acquired in a land grab of services businesses supplying the public sector. However, even after the profit warning, full year profits at Tribal are tipped to rise to £19.5 from £16.3m last time.Results: Full year – WS Atkins; Glotel; Halma; Itis Holdings Tribal Group; Trifast; Victoria. Interims – OMG; Dobbies Garden Centres.WEDNESDAY: Comments on the performance of Stagecoach’s core UK bus division will be the crucial part of the group’s full-year results statement. Williams de Broe hopes to hear positive news on initiatives to improve margins at the business. Currys and PC World are tipped to remain the strongest performing areas of the group’s UK business.

The company recently took action to tackle structural problems at the Dixons chain by closing 106 underperforming stores.TODAY: The City had expected Vedanta to unveil maiden annual results last Tuesday but the company was forced to delay the figures until this week. The mining group blamed “administrative difficulties” for the delay but this explanation did not stop a sell-off of the group’s stock.Vedanta shares are now down more than 25 per cent since its IPO at the end of last year, compared with a decline of just 5 per cent by the wider sector. JP Morgan is most comfortable with the idea of a share buy-back by Dixons and calculates that a £200m buy-back would boost earnings per share by 5 per cent. Deutsche Bank forecasts earnings before interest, interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation to rise to £326m from $224m.Results: Full year – Faupel; Quintain Estates; Vedanta Resources; Ten Alps Communications. It believes the market will take a dim view of the retailer if it fails to return cash to investors or opts to use the money for a major acquisition.In terms of the underlying performance of Dixons, analysts expect pre-tax profits to rise to £325m for the year, from £297m the last time.

So far, the Federal Reserve has argued that it will raise interest rates in a “measured” way, which arguably doesn’t say an awful lot but which markets have interpreted to mean in a “cautious” or “slow” fashion.This may have to change should the consumer carry on spending aggressively. It can either make an acquisition or return the money to shareholders. So, although employment growth has picked up, post-tax incomes will no longer be receiving a subsidy from the government. And, because of that, there’s a reasonable chance that consumer spending will gradually fade later on.The biggest problem, though, is the sustainability of the current recovery and, in particular, its dependency on leverage. For both the US and the UK, growth has been better than elsewhere in recent years in part because of aggressive shifts in macroeconomic policy.

One easy way, for example, to distinguish between the rate of expansion in the US and the UK relative to that in the eurozone is simply to take into account the ways in which the policy levers were manipulated. The approaching headwinds for the US economy are, in the short-term, a bit more bracing than those confronting the UK. First, house price inflation isn’t racing away in quite the same way in the US as in the UK (although it’s still been very strong by US standards.) Second, a lot of US homeowners fund their mortgages on the back of long-term interest rates which have already risen a long way – more than 1.5 per cent – and which, therefore, should be seen as a greater tightening of credit conditions than seen so far in the UK.Third, the Federal Reserve is well aware that the Bush tax cuts, which played such an instrumental role in maintaining consumer spending, are running out in the middle of this year. However, it is worth noting that the challenge facing the Fed may be a little less than the Bank of England’s.