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A friend is just back from a long weekend in Paris. He's still in shock. Why? The cost. He paid €16 (£14.88) for a "not terribly good" Caesar salad outside a museum. He paid €7.50 (£6.90) to get into a not-very-interesting exhibition. Most upsetting of all, he paid €16 for a starter of new season funghi at a local brasserie, when, he says, he can get girolles on toast for just £6 at his local (very smart local) in Notting Hill.
What all this tells him (as a one-time hedge-fund manager) is that the pound is too cheap and the euro too expensive. This isn't a popular view right now: the pound is at a five-month low against the dollar and is widely expected to hit – then slip below – parity with the euro any day now. But it might just be the right one.
At first glance, hating the pound makes sense. If Britain is emerging from recession, it's doing so very slowly. Manufacturing is still shrinking, consumers are saving more than they have for a long time, and consumer price inflation is still running well below its 2% target. This all suggests that UK interest rates will stay very low for a long time to come. Indeed, the consensus now seems to be that rates will remain at 0.5% until 2011. If that turns out to be the case (which it may or may not – the consensus on medium-term rates is usually wrong), sterling will end up being one of the world's lowest-yielding currencies. So it's an obvious sell.
But perhaps not for long. Right now, says Graham Turner of GFC Economics, we are "fixated" on the UK's miserable state. But when things are moving fast it's all too easy to focus on just one side of the exchange debate. Let's not forget all the problems in the eurozone. Consumer spending is weaker in Europe than it is here. The likes of Spain and Ireland are far from recovery and much of eastern Europe is still in crisis. In Latvia, retail sales fell 9.4% in the last quarter alone. "At some point the focus will shift to the anaemic recovery in Europe. Investors will then conclude that the euro is overbought," says Turner.
A final thought on this. A sudden surge of sterling strength wouldn't be particularly good for stockmarkets. As John Authurs points out in the FT, "barely 20% of the UK's mega-cap companies' revenues come from the UK". That's nice for sterling investors when the pound is weak – it increases the value of their overseas earnings. It won't be quite so nice when sterling turns.
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Merryn Somerset Webb
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