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News and views from the business world with Mickey Clark and Andrew Verity.

The Housing Minister, Grant Shapps, is meeting with the City regulator in a bid to ensure that proposed new rules on lending do not penalise first time home buyers. We speak to Andrew Montlake, communications director at mortgage brokers Coreco, about the Financial Services Authority's plans.

Meanwhile, later today, Portugal will ask the financial markets to buy more than €1bn of government bonds that it desperately needs to issue. The programme hears from Paulo Casaca, former MEP for the Portuguese Socialist Party and now an economist and consultant in Brussels, who explains why this is such a big day for Portugal.

The latest British Retail Consortium inflation numbers suggest that retailers are protecting consumers from the full force of soaring commodity prices. We ask James Walton, chief economist with food and grocery experts IGD, why retailers can't pass on all of these commodity price rises.

Finally, according to the latest monthly survey from the Recruitment and Employment Confederation and KPMG, the jobs market continued to grow solidly in December. Kevin Green is the chief executive of the Recruitment & Employment Confederation, and joins us to discuss how both permanent and temporary placements climbed in the final weeks of the year.