Another week has flown by and granted us the opportunity to take another look at the currency markets to see whether the pound has been performing well or not. Let’s find out now what occurred last time around.
An overview of the currency markets for June 4th – June 8th 2012
The last time we caught up with the British pound against the US dollar we saw that the pound was worth 1.5306. But after just one day on the markets that rate had increased to 1.5383. Would it continue to rise over the course of the week ahead? The good news for the pound was that it finished up on 1.5431 by the time the week was over, so here at least the pound had a good result.
The pound opened with a rate of 1.2422 against the Euro, and we were hoping it would rise owing to the troubles the Euro still has. But it actually went in the opposite direction, dropping to 1.2369 on Monday evening. There was a jump back to 1.2402 on Wednesday but by the end of the week the currency was down to 1.2377, so here at least the Euro had improved its standing.
Over to Hong Kong now and the opening rate of 11.879 for the British pound crept up to 11.938 by Monday evening. It was very soon apparent that the pound was looking stronger than the Hong Kong dollar, especially when it hit a rate of 12.084 on the 7th. One more day saw the currency fall back to 11.971, but this was still better than the opening rate the pound had started on.
Our next stop is the New Zealand dollar and here the opening rate for the pound was 2.0400. Would it go higher or lower from here on in? The first answer was lower as the pound finished Monday evening on 2.0322. In fact things didn’t get better than this all week. Over the course of time the pound fell and weakened to 2.0123 by Thursday evening, although it did pick up to 2.0191 by Friday evening.
Finally let’s see how the Australian dollar panned out. The pound was left on 1.5865 the last time we caught up with it, but would this go up or down this week? The initial direction was downward with a closing rate of 1.5827 on Monday evening, and indeed this was a pattern that seemed to stick for the rest of the week. The low point came on Thursday evening when the pound sank to 1.5598 but it then increased to 1.5675 to close out the week.
Notable events in the world of currency
Good news for the pound against the Canadian dollar
Here the pound went from 1.5893 to 1.5958 over the course of the week, rising a total of 0.0065 as a result.
A drop against the Swiss franc
The news was not as good here though, as the pound went down from 1.4916 to 1.4867.
The pound does well against the Chinese yuan
There was more good news here as the pound soared from 9.7498 to 9.8379 over the course of the week.
As is always the case there were many dramatic changes in the currency rates over the course of the week, as we have seen above. Many of these changes were reflected in news stories of the week, as seen on sites including Bloomberg. This news story gave us an insight into the pound’s performance against the US dollar. It was not the best outcome we could have hoped for, but given the uncertainty across the world at the moment it could have been worse.
So we come to the end of another week and once again it is a mixed bag of results we are left with. Perhaps next week we will see a more consistent mix of results with the pound doing well against a wider range of currencies. But for now we can take heart that there have been some solid results this week, even if they were mixed in with some disappointing ones as well.
I’m surprised at the scale of the drop against the New Zealand dollar. More than two cents down in a week? Why is it the pound can lose so much against this particular currency in such a short space of time? I know it can fall or rise against any other currency but this one and the Australian currency seem to stand out as being particularly troublesome in this way. Mind you next week we’ll probably gain it all back and more.
Not sure what the answer is here Kate but I’ve noticed it too. Maybe the Kiwi dollar is more prone to being changeable, and that’s why the pound is affected by it so much. I would be interested to see if it was just the pound that experienced huge changes against the Kiwi dollar in this way, or whether there were plenty of other major currencies that were affected in a similar fashion each time. After all, you said the pound had a huge change, but the Kiwi dollar had an equally huge change the other way around against the pound didn’t it? So surely the same must apply elsewhere otherwise it wouldn’t make sense.