Since the beginning of this month, GBP has sharply gone against major currencies such as USD, JPY, AUD or NZD though GBP peaked out in last Autumn of 2015.
Compared with the level at the end of 2015, GBPJPY got the sharpest decline more than 12.0% down, GBPUSD is following down at 6.0%, and even against AUD and NZD, GBP has gone down 5.0% and 3.6% respectively.
Due to the rate cut of AUD and NZD for a last few years, GBP and other currencies have been relatively stringer against AUD and NZD whose interest rates are more stable now than before.
However, even though their rates had been cut, the policy rate in
Australia is still 2.0% and it is 2.5% in New Zealand while the rate in England is only 0.50%. Also looking at the credit rating of sovereign debts of them, S&P rated AAA (stable) for Australia, AA (stable) for New Zealand and AAA (negative) for United Kingdom. Simply thinking, Australia has better credit rating and more interest rate, which of Australian or English debt do you want to invest?
We cannot miss out that global stock markets have been downward and volatile since the beginning of the year. The market shows
some symptoms of financial crisis, particularly strength of JPY and weakness of GBP. Remember Lehman crisis 2008, JPY had been the strongest currency in the market.
What happened in crisis probably happens now again, it is still a question from the view of investment because Japan has S&P rating only A+ (stable) and negative interest rate at -0.1%. Do you want to invest?
2015 was geopolitically unstable year, and 2016 will be economically and (geo)politically unstable due to the volatile market, US president election, Brexit, Spanish goverment, ...
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