The British pound had a reasonably good week last time – better at least than it had done on some other previous occasions. But could it now have another good week and give us more to celebrate whenever we glance at the currency converter? Let’s find out the answer now.
An overview of the currency markets for April 11th – April 15th 2011
The last rate we saw for the pound against the US dollar was 1.6347. But the only way was down initially, as we dropped to a weekly low of 1.6286. This occurred on Tuesday evening, so at least we know that things got better after that.
With that said though the next day wasn’t too much better; we ended on 1.6287 in this case. However we did at least manage to pick up during the last couple of days to finish slightly better than we’d started, with 1.6349 on the cards.
Moving onto the Euro now we had an opening rate of 1.1351 to go from. But again we saw a consistent pattern of bad news for the start of the week, taking a few days to drop to 1.1238. We managed to claw some of those losses back eventually though, finishing the week on 1.1314 as a result. But this was still lower than the starting point we had on Monday morning.
There seemed to be a similar pattern occurring through many currencies too. We saw the same against the Hong Kong dollar. We’d started on 12.700 and 48 hours later the British pound was sitting at 12.660 instead. However not only did we manage to claim back our losses here, we also managed to add some improvements to the mix. By Friday evening we had raised the pound to 12.711.
Next up it is the turn of the New Zealand dollar, where the pound was last claiming 2.0938. We have had a bad run against this currency for the past few weeks, and now we were hoping we could have a better time. Unfortunately four out of the five days of the trading week saw another loss for the pound. The one remaining good day was hardly good either, since we ended up with a week closing figure of 2.0538. So this was another bad time for the pound.
Finally we have the Australian dollar to look at. We started the week here on 1.5536, and immediately dropped back to 1.5504 on Monday evening. But the changes here from day to day were small ones, and luckily we ended up on 1.5504 on Friday night.
Notable events in the world of currency
Good news against the Canadian dollar
It wasn’t all bad news for the British pound last week though, as we managed to climb from 1.5597 to 1.5766 over the course of the week.
But bad luck against the Swiss franc
It wasn’t good here though as the pound fell from 1.4941 to 1.4592 over the course of the week.
A slight dip overall against the Chinese yuan
This could have been worse as the starting rate of 10.683 dipped more steeply in the middle of the week before recovering to 10.679 overall.
The main theme of the news stories on Reuters last week could have been summed up in two words – “sterling falls”. We have seen already that it was not the best week for the British pound, and this was borne out in the articles that appeared on the Reuters website among others. A good example was this one.
It would seem as if we have some patient waiting to do before we can look forward to a stronger pound on the currency markets. A lot seems to depend on the state of the economy, although this is an experience being seen in many countries elsewhere as well.
We’ll be watching to see what happens next.
Sterling certainly did fall this week didn’t it? It’s disappointing just lately to see how badly the currency is doing. Hopefully things will improve but it looks as though it will take a while for it to happen. I haven’t seen things this bad against the New Zealand dollar for a while though. I wonder whether it will drop below the two dollar mark in the near future? Somehow I think it might well do that.