Black Wednesday

For Black Wednesday, the South African government crackdown the media, see Black Wednesday (SA).

In British politics and economics, Black Wednesday refers to 16 September 1992 when the Conservative government was forced to withdraw the Pound from the European Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM) due to pressure by currency speculators—most notably George Soros who made over US$1 billion from this speculation. In 1997 the UK Treasury estimated the cost of Black Wednesday at £3.4 billion.

The trading losses in August and September were estimated at £800m, but the main loss to taxpayers arose because the devaluation could have made them a profit. The papers show that if the government had maintained $24bn foreign currency reserves and the pound had fallen by the same amount, the UK would have made a £2.4bn profit on sterling's devaluation (Financial Times 10 February 2005). The papers also show that the Treasury spent £27bn of reserves in propping up the pound; the Treasury calculates the ultimate loss was only £3.4bn.

The prelude

When the ERM was set up in 1979, Britain declined to join. This was a controversial decision as the Chancellor of the Exchequer Geoffrey Howe, despite his economically 'dry' credentials, was a convinced pro-European. His successor Nigel Lawson was also a believer in a fixed exchange rate, and although he was a mild Eurosceptic he admired the low inflationary record of West Germany, attributing it to the strength of the Deutsche Mark and the management of the Bundesbank. Thus although Britain had not joined the ERM, for several years the Treasury followed a semi-official policy of 'shadowing' the Deutsche Mark.

At the same time, and in addition to open market trading of currencies, the Treasury's main tool in attempting to control the exchange rate was through the setting of the value of Sterling. As a consequence, interest rates were set with consideration of the domestic demand and inflation environment as only a secondary consideration. This led to a number of years of lower interest rates than would have otherwise been the case, and hence to rising inflation.

Matters came to a head in a clash between Margaret Thatcher's economic advisor, Alan Walters, and Lawson, when Walters claimed that the Exchange Rate Mechanism was "half baked". This led to Lawson resigning as chancellor to be replaced by his old protégé John Major, who, with Douglas Hurd, the then Foreign Secretary, pressured Margaret Thatcher to sign Britain up to the ERM in October 1990, effectively guaranteeing that the British Government would follow an economic and monetary policy that would prevent the exchange rate between the pound and other member currencies from fluctuating by more than 6%. The pound entered the mechanism at 2.95 Deutsche Mark to the pound. Hence, if the exchange rate ever neared the bottom of its permitted range, 2.778 marks, the government would be obliged to intervene. With UK inflation at three times the rate of Germany's, interest rates at 15% and the "Lawson Boom" about to bust, the conditions for joining the ERM were not favourable at that time.

From the beginning of the 1990s, high German interest rates, set by the Bundesbank to counteract inflationary effects related to excess expenditure on German reunification, caused significant stress across the whole of the ERM. The UK and Italy had additional difficulties with their double deficits. Issues of national prestige and the commitment to a doctrine that the fixing of exchange rates within the ERM was a pathway to a single European currency inhibited the adjustment of exchange rates. In the wake of the rejection of the Maastricht Treaty by the Danish electorate in a referendum in the spring of 1992, those ERM currencies that were trading close to the bottom of their ERM bands came under speculative attack in the foreign exchange markets by currency speculators.

The currency speculators' attack

The fundamental sterling problem in September 1992 was that the dollar was rapidly depreciating against the deutschmark. Tied as it was to the ERM, the pound was hence appreciating to unsustainable levels against the US currency. With a large proportion of British exports priced in dollars, a pound/dollar correction was well overdue. ERM membership was preventing this from happening. In anticipation of the inevitable dam-bursting, speculators hastened the process by borrowing pounds (and also lire) and selling them for DM, in the expectation of being able to repay the loan in devalued currency and to pocket the difference.

On September 16 the British government announced a rise in the base interest rate from an already high 10% to 12% in order to tempt speculators to buy pounds. Despite this and a promise later the same day to raise base rates again to 15%, dealers kept selling pounds, convinced that the government would not stick with its promise. By 19:00 that evening, Norman Lamont, then Chancellor, announced Britain would leave the ERM and rates would remain at the new level of 12%.

The aftermath

Other ERM countries such as Italy, whose currencies had breached their bands during the day, returned to the system with broadened bands or with adjusted central parities. Even in this relaxed form, ERM-I proved vulnerable, and ten months later the rules were relaxed further to the point of imposing very little constraint on the domestic monetary policies of member states.

The effect of the high German interest rates, and so the high British interest rates, had been arguably to put Britain into recession as large numbers of businesses failed and the housing market crashed. In his memoirs, John Major claimed that ERM membership had had the beneficial effect of wringing inflation out of Britain's system.

In the months following Black Wednesday, and for a few years later, the pound traded substantially below its ERM lower band. It dipped below 2.20 Deutsche Mark in spring 1995. From this point onwards however, it began a sustained recovery and, at one point, touched the value of 3.20 DM. Some commentators believe that 'Black' Wednesday has proved to be good for the British economy in the long-term, as interest rates were allowed to find their natural level and the government was encouraged to adopt institutional changes that have further strengthened the economy. Ironically, sterling subsequently rallied in the autumn of 1996 and early 1997 back to the levels where it had been before Black Wednesday; sterling's trade weighted index remained fairly stable at these levels until late 2006.

Indeed the performance of the UK economy subsequent to the events of Black Wednesday has been significantly stronger than that of the Eurozone and, despite the damage caused to the economy in the short term, many economists now use the term 'White Wednesday' to describe the day (a term originally coined by Euro-sceptics happy at the stalling of further European integration). According to figures from the OECD, the average annual growth rate between 1996 and 2005 works out at 2.2% in France, 1.5% in Italy, 1.3% in Germany, 2% for the Eurozone overall and 2.7% in the UK .

However, the reputation of the Conservatives for competent handling of the economy was shattered. The Conservatives had recently won the 1992 General Election, and the Gallup poll for September showed a 2.5% Conservative lead. By the October poll, following Black Wednesday, they had plunged from 43% voting intention to 29%, while Labour jumped into a lead which they held more-or-less unbroken (except for a several brief periods such as during the 2000 Fuel Protests. It has taken 15 years for the Conservatives regained the 42%+ popularity that is considered the minimum necessary for a Conservative general election victory. Many commentators believe that the event was a key reason for the party's long-term relative unpopularity.

EU economists' analysis of this event concluded that stable exchange rates are the result, not the cause, of a common approach to economic management, resulting in the Stability and Growth Pact that underpins ERM II and subsequently the Euro single currency.

See also

• Monetary policy of Sweden - 1992

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External links

• BBC "On This Day" article on Black Wednesday