It’s time once again to see how the British pound performed on the currency converter last week. Last time we saw it had enjoyed a good run against all the major currencies, but would it manage to do the same this week as well? Let’s see what happened.
An overview of the currency markets for March 19th – March 23rd 2012
Our opening salvo is between the British pound and the US dollar, and the pound ended the previous week on 1.5811. Could it do better than this? It started well, rising to 1.5873 on day one, but then it dropped steadily over the next few days to end Thursday on 1.5801. Fortunately it leapt back to claim a higher rate of 1.5834 on Friday, so it did well in the end.
Let’s move on to the Euro now, where the pound was beginning the week on 1.2055. This improved to 1.2070 on Monday evening, but it then started to slide much as it had against the US dollar. A low of 1.1976 recovered to 1.2000 on Thursday, before slipping back to 1.1957 on Friday night.
Next it’s the turn of the Hong Kong dollar, against which the pound was worth 12.274. We had a great start to the week here as the pound rose to 12.322. It then repeated the pattern we’d seen elsewhere and fell to 12.270 by Thursday evening. Clearly the middle of the week wasn’t a good time for the pound. But it did manage to climb to 12.296 to gain a good result for the week overall.
So could we achieve something similar against the New Zealand dollar? Here we had a starting rate of 1.9218, and we were hoping for a better week overall than we had seen elsewhere. It was certainly a different pattern, since the pound had climbed to an impressive 1.9553 by Thursday evening. Of course this set us up for a dip at the last minute, but the pound still did well by stalling the fall on 1.9490, giving us an impressive result for the week overall.
Finally it is the turn of the Australian dollar to try and stall the progress made by the British pound this week. The opening rate was 1.4949 and things were boding well for the pound as it finished off Monday night on 1.5030. In fact it was successful all the way this week, as it managed to rise to 1.5239 by the time the week was over.
Notable events in the world of currency
More good news against the Canadian dollar
The pound managed to rise up here too, going from 1.5660 to 1.5859 over the course of the week.
But not such good news against the Swiss franc
Here the franc proved to be too much for us, as the pound dropped steadily from 1.4550 to reach 1.4413 by the end of the week.
A tiny drop against the Chinese yuan as well
Here the news was not much better. From a starting rate of 9.997 we hit 10.029 the next day before falling back to 9.978 by the close of the week.
The story of the good week the pound had seen against some other world currencies was borne out by a number of news stories this week, including this one. Some of the results were clearly going in the right direction from Monday onwards, while others took a few more days to come right.
So we have seen a couple of promising weeks now for the British pound; will there be others to come as well? We can only hope that the British pound will perform well like this in the future too, although we know from experience that the pound tends to go through periods like this, which are invariably followed by troughs in the performance as well. We can only wait and see whether next week will produce such a trough, or whether the good news will continue.
It’s nice to see some good results for the pound. Let’s hope it continues this time instead of crashing into bad results the very next week. I’ve seen this happen a good few times so forgive me for being cynical!
I’m cynical too Kate – I don’t blame you for feeling like that!