Wednesday 29 October 2008

George Osborne - a twat keeps digging

Also from that Telegraph article:

The pound has lost a quarter of its value against the dollar over the past year, even more than the devaluations under Jim Callaghan and Harold Wilson, and almost 50 per cent more than in the year following Black Wednesday.

That may well be factually correct, but you can prove what you like by comparing GBP to any other currency at random. The Goblin King could counter that GBP had strengthened by 22% against AUD since this summer:
The only fair way to look at this is to compare GBP against a basket of currencies. As at a week ago, GBP had fallen by slightly less between late 2007 and late 2008 than it did between mid-1992 and mid-1993 (ignoring the overshoot in the first couple of months of 1993):
So, faced with several open goals, The Boy Wonder goes for an own goal instead.

UPDATE: in the spirit of being entirely fair about this, I updated my spreadsheet this evening and by yesterday's close, GBP had in fact dipped to 0.88, which puts the Tories and Nulab about level pegging in the 'presiding over booms and busts in sterling' stakes.

4 comments:

John B said...

out of interest what's the basket you're using there?

Mark Wadsworth said...

USD, CAD, GBP, EUR, CHF, JPY, SGD & AUD. I weight them thusly: let's say long run average USD = 60p, that gets multiplied by 1.67 so that all inputs = roughly £1 in long run. I don't do any further weighting than that, as it seems a fair mix across currency blocs (N America, Europe and Asia-Pacific).

Anonymous said...

Wot abaht the Icelandic krona? Bet we're beating that. At the moment.

Anonymous said...

I hate cherry-picked figures, whichever side uses them. It's what I love about blogging: you swiftly get called on it.