The wider loss was in line with expectations and reflected the business’s seasonal nature and the £30m acquisition of Eurosites, also from MyTravel, last autumn.Analysts like the group’s management team as well as its double-digit earnings track record. It is well positioned to meet the increasing demand for tailor-made holidays, which should stand it in good stead longer term even if the immediate outlook is less hot.Its shares, down 7p at 498p, have performed well since this column tipped them just over a year ago. One to tuck away.MMT Computing is one IT boy to avoidMMT Computing, a software and services company, is suffering from the same sickness dogging the rest of the IT sector. Customers are cutting back on spending on IT, while buying cycles are lengthening.Yesterday’s figures for the first half to 28 February didn’t make particularly inspiring reading.

The company made a pre-tax loss of £266,000 compared with a profit of £93,000 a year before and sales fell to £12.5m from £14.6m.The good news is the company’s results are more weighted to the second half of the year and MMT Computing estimates it has already got about 60 per cent of those revenues in the bag. That gives it a reasonable degree of confidence it can make analysts’ forecasts for the year of a pretax profit of just more than £1m. It also has some £6m of cash on the balance sheet.The bad news is that the IT sector is not yet showing any signs of a revival and MMT, in common with others in the sector, does not have a massive degree of visibility Deals are taking longer to close across the board. The shares, down 2.5p at 119p, on a forward p/e of 18, don’t look appetizing Sell.. Self-evident weakness in the economy should have made the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee cut interest rates yesterday. The fact that it did not is explained by concern over the housing bubble, and of course the recent fall in the value of the pound, which has clear inflationary implications. A subsidiary consideration would have been that to cut interest rates at a time when inflation is significantly above target might have triggered a self fulfiling expectation of continued high levels of inflation.

All the above obviously give reasonable cause for the Bank to sit on its hands and do nothing, but the risk in the economy at the moment is still much more that of subdued growth or even recession than inflation. If that perception turns out to have been wrong, little harm would have been done by shaving another quarter point off the base rate. Any such action could in any case easily be reversed if it proves misconceived.Interest rates are already so low that another quarter point would be unlikely to further inflate the housing market, but it might have helped rock bottom business confidence and revived flagging consumer confidence a bit too. Most companies feel a little better now that the geo-political uncertainty of Iraq has been removed, but they take a look around the world and they see Alan Greenspan, chairman of the Federal Reserve, raising the bogey of deflation in America, the reality of deflation in Japan and large parts of the rest of the Far East, and the near reality of it in Germany.The overriding psychology is therefore still one of extreme caution. I know of hardly any private sector companies which are committing to major new investment right now. Show us unambiguous evidence of a sustained upturn, they say, and then we might be prepared to think about it.The key new ingredient to the interest rate equation is the rapid depreciation of the pound.

Since the beginning of the year, it’s fallen around 8 per cent against the euro taking it back to where it was when the euro was first launched. It has also fallen sharply against all other major currencies except the even more sickly dollar, which the markets have blindly decided to trash.It’s hard to know quite what to make of this phenomenon, for it is not as if the core eurozone economies are obviously better places to invest than the UK. In part it is explained by the conflicting noises coming out of Downing Street over the Government’s position on the euro. The present dithering is the worst of all possible worlds, for if the capital markets sense an uncertainty, they vote with their feet. None the less, the fall in the pound ought to be a boon to Britain’s beleaguered manufacturing industry, making its goods more competitive both at home and abroad.Personally, I’m not convinced it will make as much of a difference as some believe. The trouble is that all the world’s major economies need a competitive devaluation in order to generate an export led recovery. Ironically, it is only the two strongest economies, the US and the UK, which are getting it, but it doesn’t much help if there is no demand in the economies you are devaluing against.