Here's the up-to-date chart showing sterling against a basket of other currencies since 1990. As you can see, it recovered a bit and is now heading back to it's all time low of nine months ago, but it's not an absolute disaster or anything (the UK economy is doing badly, but only marginally worse than the others). Click to enlarge:
The only currency to have done staggeringly well this year is the Australian dollar, as it happens. It crashed late last year when the JPY carry-trade bubble burst, but Australia was one of the few countries to have hiked interest rates slightly in response to the global property price bubble (rather than cutting them to keep it going) and so even though it has reduced its base rate (to keep the economy going - so far they have avoided a recession, allegedly), it's still much higher than in most countries. Click to enlarge:
Tuesday, 29 September 2009
Sterling, Australian Dollar
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5 comments:
This is of more than passing interest to me. Last year I converted Australian dollars and was tossing up about it this year. I read this with interest.
And the Howard government, which handled many economic issues far better than almost any other, got slung out of office.
And Blair, Clinton and W aren't in jail yet. There ain't no justice.
JH, you have to start thinking about bailing out soon-ish, you might squeeze out another five or ten per cent if you time it right.
D, agreed. The new Labour government has done its best to overturn as much of it as possible, but a lot of the old common sense remains.
That's it then - Let's go down under.
Anon, exactly wrong. Buy low and sell high. Why would you sell GBP low and buy AUD high?
Plus their house price bubble was (relative to earnings) even bigger than ours - they are also trying to keep it inflated with "first time buyer incentives" and suchlike nonsense, so we ought to let that one pan out first.
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