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Pound slump



The interest rates arms race

Since December’s rate rise from the Covid low of 0.1 per cent, the Bank has pushed up the cost of borrowing to 1.75 per cent to try to tame an inflation rate driven by the rise in energy prices that Truss is now promising to dampen. Next week, the day before the Bank makes its move, the Fed seems poised for a third consecutive 75 basis points rise. At the start of August, when the Tory leadership battle was raging and uncertainty abounded over Truss’s economic policies and plans for tax cuts, traders detected weakness in the pound that was not just related to the dollar. Sterling started to fall against a basket of currencies, said Chris Turner, global head of markets at ING, and is down 4 per cent against that basket since last month.

«Right now, policymakers around the world would much prefer strong currencies to help in the battle against largely imported inflation,» said Turner. This shows Britain is consuming more than it produces and needs to maintain the confidence of overseas investors to fund the difference. Dales is convinced that it can.

The case for going for growth

Few now doubt that Truss and Kwarteng are serious about pushing through new economic policies after the sacking of Tom Scholar, the most senior civil servant in the Treasury, where officials were said to be cautioning that any tax cuts could fuel inflation and force interest rates even higher. One economist in the Truss camp is Gerard Lyons, former head of global research at Standard Chartered, an adviser to Boris Johnson when he was mayor of London, and now chief economic strategist at financial adviser Netwealth. «The very idea that someone having a pro-growth strategy is seen as radical shows how far we’ve moved away from where we should be,» he said. « We need to fundamentally change that mindset to ask how to get growth higher».

On the first of these, he said the UK should ditch all the fiscal rules apart from the key measure of reducing the debt-to-GDP ratio, which would provide fiscal discipline. That leaves monetary policy to tackle inflation.

The currency conundrum

It remains to be seen what happens to sterling in the coming days. But as inflation is not going to rise as much as had been expected, the Bank will not need to raise rates as much, said Jordan Rochester, currency strategist at Nomura. The first sign inflation is starting to slow could come this week when Nomura sees the consumer prices index for August dropping back from 10.1 to 9.9 per cent. «That will close the current account deficit and rebalance the economy,» he said.

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