Currency - GBP / Euro

Greece has offered a package of austerity measures which ought to save the beleaguered country some €4.8 billion in the year ahead. That seems to have appeased the rest of the Eurozone for the time being and should ensure Greece gets some financial support from its bestest mates the Germans and the French but the announcement wasn’t greeted with a sudden rush of Euro buying. That suggests the financial markets are either more wary of the plan than the EU finance ministers appear to be or that traders always knew something would be resolved but not necessarily the full detail of the shape that resolution would take or perhaps that the old adage that there’s ‘many a slip twixt cup and lip’ may well apply. Greece has a long road to follow to get all their plans in place and the resistance of the Greek people is the most sizable hurdle.
Germany and France also have the problem of sneaking funding into Greece through proxy banks because, by the letter of the Euro agreement, they shouldn’t act to bail out another member state and the German and French public don’t seem any keener than Angela Merkel to be paying for Greece’s profligate and corrupt past. So here we sit with Sterling being battered slightly more than the Euro because we have just as many debt worries as Greece and we have the hassle of anm election and the potential for a hung parliament to contend with. No one can be at all surprised that the Pound is on the back foot and no one should be under any misunderstanding that the Pound could well fall further in the months ahead. Thanksfully we are getting spikes and troughs in this currency pair and these are offering slivers of hope in amongst all the doom and gloom but capturing a spike in this market manually takes the skill of the Karate Kid’s mentor Mr Miyagi using chopsticks to catch flies. A simpler technique is to place an order in the market to sit in wait for the right exchange rate and then strike automatically like a ninja. This martial arts analogy has probably gone too far so I’ll leave it there. Yours sincerely. Grasshopper.