We certainly had a disappointing report to close with last time, as the pound took quite a battering from some of the other currencies. Words such as ‘slump’, ‘recession’ and ‘volatility’ were very much at the forefront of our report, so will we see more of the same this time around?
Certainly the outlook for the British pound’s results on the currency converter does not bode well. Hopefully it might just be a spanner in the works that will easily be removed, but this doesn’t look to be the case.
Let’s press on and see how the closing days of last week panned out.
An overview of the currency markets for August 25th – August 27th 2010
The final figure achieved by the pound against the US dollar on Tuesday was a dismal 1.5518. But would it slide even more or could we actually do better than that by the end of the week?
The 25th saw another drop to 1.5409 but it rallied again the next day to 1.5527. The week finally ended on 1.5492 so we could clearly see that the pound was on a bad run for this week at least.
But could it perform any better against the Euro? Well we were starting from the previous closing rate of 1.2208 and the amount we inched up by on the Wednesday was painful – we closed on 1.2217.
We kept heading in the right direction though and grabbed a rate of 1.2233 on Thursday… before we lost the plot and dropped to 1.2186 to close out the week.
Moving swiftly on from that disaster let’s see if we could do better against the Hong Kong dollar. 12.064 was the starting point here and by Wednesday evening we were already on the back foot with a rate of 11.985 on the cards. A good surge the following day pushed that back up to 12.076, but by Friday night we were licking our wounds again as we fell a little to 12.052.
So could we achieve anything better in New Zealand? The Kiwi dollar has a habit of returning either very good or very bad results – middling ones don’t seem to be very common. The starting point for the pound this time was 2.2068 but we had a better day the following day as the pound pushed the Kiwi dollar – we ended up on 2.2114 this time around.
But that was as good as it would get. Thursday saw the pound drop back to 2.2093 and by the time the week was over we finished up once again on a lowly 2.1959. What could we do to try and get a better rate for the week?
We just have the Aussie dollar to go now, where the pound was last on 1.7475. Once again we saw a promising start as the pound pushed up to 1.7530, but just one day later the amount had changed to 1.7515. It was only a small drop but a drop nonetheless. Finally we finished on 1.7453 to close out a disappointing week.
Notable events in the world of currency
Pound drops against the Barbados dollar
This was a subtle but disappointing drop too, with the pound falling from 3.1053 to 3.0989 over three days.
Very little movement between US dollar and Euro
There was something of a deadlock here as the rate changed imperceptibly from 0.7867 to 0.7865 over the course of the three days.
Slightly better news for the Euro
There was indeed better news here as the Euro climbed from 9.8823 to 9.8901 against the Hong Kong dollar.
There was a fascinating story about the head to head between the Aussie dollar and the New Zealand dollar on the Bloomberg website on Friday.
So once again it hasn’t been a good week for the pound, which makes us think the bad omens about the future of the pound are indeed true. According to those in the know the second half of the year is not looking good. And since we are just coming to the end of August now, we are clearly in this period of time.
We’ll just have to ride out the storm as best we can and wait to see what happens next.