Friday 14 November 2008

Black 2008

Here's a chart showing GBP's progress against the same basket of other currencies. The blue series covers the two years 1 January 1992 to 31 December 1993; the red series covers 1 January 2007 up to today's date:
So, if the value of a nation's currency is a measure of its government, yet again, Nulabour have shown themselves to be worse than the Tories.

* Fans of technical analysis will no doubt spot the impressive Symmetric Triangle in the blue series. Rather surprisingly, there was no break out in either direction in 1994. GBP fell a further three or four per cent in 1995, but that was that, after that it started picking up again.

5 comments:

Lola said...

Wasn't Black (White?) Wednesday 16th September 1992 something to do with this? As in, Sterling was already overvalued and the speculative attack was successful - A Good Thing - and after we got out of the loony tunes ERM things started to get better?

Letters From A Tory said...

A symmetric what?

Mark Wadsworth said...

L, White Wed shows up as the drop from 1.15 to 1 (that you can see on the chart), but GBP's fall continued thereafter for three or four years. Apart from that, agreed.

LFOAT, you're not a fan of technical analysis, I take it?

Anonymous said...

In the late 60s at business school I studied techniques of stock market investment which included technical analysis. I concluded that it's black magic and crap BUT as long as there are enough stock market players who believe in technical analysis to affect the market then not only is it a valid subject to study, it might actually be translated into profits.

TA is very much like astrology (or Madonna's school of Kabbalah) in that regard. If the people one has to deal with in any particular walk of life believe in such nonsense then you have to know what makes them tick. Accordingly, we reach a paradox whereby a knowledge - indeed, study - of nonsense thereby becomes sensible.

Anonymous said...

Umbongo: an excellent point. I had never considered that.