Today's Budget was never going to be received with rapture by business.
You can read more detail about what it means for your business in this briefing hot off the press from our economics team.
With public borrowing hitting £175bn this year, the Chancellor had limited room to provide business with much relief or to help it invest for the upturn. Probably the most important measure was the £5bn scheme to compensate for the reduction in trade credit insurance, while the increase in capital allowances and the car scrapping scheme were also helpful. Firms would also have been relieved not to have been hit with any immediate significant rise in costs, save for the increase in statutory redundancy pay.
But it's the scary borrowing numbers and how the government will get them down that loomed large in everyone's minds. The Chancellor projects that public sector borrowing will fall from 12.4% of GDP this year to 5.5% by 2013, with higher tax receipts doing a third of the work and lower public spending growth the rest. But this assumes the economy returns to robust rates of growth, expanding by an annual 3.25% for three years from 2011, based on a return to its trend growth rate of 2.75% per year with growth temporarily boosted by picking up some of the slack built up this year.
The lessons from Japan in the 1990s suggest that the UK and the world economy face major challenges in dealing with the damage caused by the collapse of its banking system. Add in the danger of increased protectionism and a likely long-term increase in the cost of credit and those growth numbers look particularly optimistic. Business will need to keep its fingers firmly crossed for the next few years that the numbers add up and that the government will not be tapping it up to plug the hole in its Budget.