It’s time to check out how well the British pound performed on the currency converter for the first week of the New Year. Did it start as it meant to go on, or was it running behind from the very beginning? Let’s find out.
An overview of the currency markets for January 2nd – January 6th 2012
Let’s see how the pound got started against the US dollar first of all. It began with an exchange rate of 1.5490 and by the 3rd January it had risen to 1.5583. This was encouraging but it was also the highest rate we would see for this week. Unfortunately we fell back a little for the remaining couple of days and finished on a rate of 1.5459 on Friday 6th.
So would we be in for a similar experience against the Euro? Here we were starting from a position of 1.1971, but there was a very different story in the offing. By the 3rd we had gone up slightly to 1.1974 but there was better news on the way. We continued to pile pressure on the weaker Euro throughout the week and ended on 1.2100 as a result. It was a good week for us here to start the year.
Let’s move on and see if we could achieve more against the Hong Kong dollar now as well. Here our opening rate was 12.032, and we did well over the first half of the week, achieving a high of 12.106 on the 3rd. But from then on we started sliding backwards. Unfortunately this led us to a low point of 12.004 on the 6th January.
So could we perform any better against the New Zealand dollar? We were starting with a rate of just over two dollars – 2.0037 to be exact. But we immediately dropped below the two dollar mark and ended up staying below it for the remainder of the week. Eventually we finished Friday evening with a rate of 1.9780 on the cards, so hopefully we can improve on this and get back above two dollars in the next week to come.
Finally let’s see if we could avoid a similar drop against the Australian dollar. The opening rate here was 1.5231 but unfortunately there was indeed a similar picture on the cards. We couldn’t hang on to that rate of exchange and by Friday we were lower on 1.5091.
Notable events in the world of currency
A see saw event against the Canadian dollar
There was no telling where we would end up against this currency. We started on 1.5820 and after some ups and downs the final weekly figure was 1.5792.
But an improvement against the Swiss franc
There was better news here though, as the pound climbed from 1.4552 to 1.4735.
A better result against the Icelandic krona as well
Here we were able to climb from 189.630 to 191.099 over the course of the week.
Of course we shouldn’t have expected anything different to the revelation that the Euro would start the year in a struggling manner. We’ve seen this above already, and we saw more news of this manner in the report on the FT.com website recently. Read this once you have logged into your free account.
It shows that faith in the Euro is still on the slide. There is no question that the currency is struggling to achieve anything of note, and the future is more than just uncertain. Now the story is that the US dollar is appreciating against the currency as well, and this is seen by some as being the last area where the troubled European currency could hope to achieve something. Clearly there is much more news to be seen here and we shall report on it as it happens.
We’ll be back next week as usual to focus on the next results from the British pound.