Off topic and past giving a damn, but me being thick makes me stuggle to fathom the intricacies(sp) of the financial markets and thus the value of the Pound Sterling; here we have it that most European countries are in financial meltdown and the EURO is about to sink without trace if you believe the news, the US $ is supposedly also in all sorts of trouble, the USA has lost its AAA credit rating and Obama is starting to get a bit concerned about the state of the US economy (understatement) and yet here in rip off Britain we're told that we're out of recession and things are improving. Now in laymans terms to me that reads that the Pound £ should be fairly strong against the other currencies - but whilst the Pound £ has strenghthened a little recently it's still doing pretty dire things especially against the Euro. WTF is going on?
Those intricacies confuse you and me both then - from watching too many news articles, my take on the situ is in 2008 when sh!t hit the fan the £ devalued by circa 25% against the other major Western currencies - happened because the UK was hurt more at first due to finanical market exposure, service sector dependant blah blah.
It's a wee luxury the UK has, as the devaluation kept us competitive as an economy and hence not completely screwed today - I'm not anti-€ but places like Ireland, Greece, Portugaul etc. cannot do this as they are locked into the €; so their economies couldn't stay competitive with interest rates and borrowing rising, at the same time as bank bailouts and other fubars. Their smaller economies have had to be bailed out.
That 'locked in to €' problem is because Germany and the other big euro economies are kind of keeping the value of the € on an even keel as they are coping reasonably well (I'm generalising but eg they didn't do stupid housing projects, had strong economies in the 1st place and had better banking habits) and can't afford to hamstring themselves by devaluing for the sake of smaller countries' economies.
A whole different story, leading to why the € has big problems is... this bailing out strategy can work for a few countries whilst keeping the big countries happy but when enormous bailouts might become needed for places like Spain and Italy, well - who the hell knows what happens then as the Euro zone can't keep digging for much longer.
My two pence, it's not going to get seriously 'worse' but it's not going to improve for many years either.
tl;dr - we're f**ked, US is f**ked, Europe is f**ked - but in slightly different ways, so the experience for punters is sometimes different depending on where you live.
First post btw, been lurking here for a while since getting my GTI in Feb, so Hello
