Recovery boosts the pound

published 20 February 2014

Inflation has fallen below the Bank of England's target rate of 2% for the first time since November 2009. Consumer Price Index (CPI) inflation dipped to an annual rate of 1.9% in January, down from 2% in December.

Meanwhile, jobless data continue to be positive. While the unemployment rate jumped from 7.1% to 7.2% in the three months to December, employment rose by 193,000, while the number of people out of work and claiming benefits slid by a hefty 27,600 in January.

The pound, buoyed by the recent run of good news, hit a five-year high against both the dollar and a basket of the currencies of Britain's major trading partners.

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What the commentators said

Especially encouraging, said Deutsche Bank, is that the pace of full-time jobs growth is at its highest level since the early 1990s. The number of part-time jobs has also started to fall, suggesting that part-timers are migrating to full-time work.

In the meantime, the edge is coming off the cost of living crisis'. Earnings are still only growing at an annual rate of 1.1%.

Of course, that won't make the crisis suddenly disappear, as Patrick Collinson pointed out on Guardian.co.uk. It will take years for workers to recover their spending power. Real wages (ie, adjusted for inflation) are at 2004 levels. It's also worth noting that the old measure of inflation, which includes housing costs, ticked up to 2.8% in January.

Yet even though the recovery has yet to become fully entrenched, markets are pricing in an interest-rate rise in February next year. This may be too early, but other major central banks are "not yet even seriously considering" tightening monetary policy, said Lee Hardman of Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ. So the relative appeal of the pound, and hence its ascent, could continue.

Andrew is the editor of MoneyWeek magazine. He grew up in Vienna and studied at the University of St Andrews, where he gained a first-class MA in geography & international relations.

After graduating he began to contribute to the foreign page of The Week and soon afterwards joined MoneyWeek at its inception in October 2000. He helped Merryn Somerset Webb establish it as Britain’s best-selling financial magazine, contributing to every section of the publication and specialising in macroeconomics and stockmarkets, before going part-time.

His freelance projects have included a 2009 relaunch of The Pharma Letter, where he covered corporate news and political developments in the German pharmaceuticals market for two years, and a multiyear stint as deputy editor of the Barclays account at Redwood, a marketing agency.

Andrew has been editing MoneyWeek since 2018, and continues to specialise in investment and news in German-speaking countries owing to his fluent command of the language.