Perhaps I should be writing about my last trip, but I had to show you all something fairly remarkable. I was online last last night, and I checked the exchange rate. I noticed the Pound was falling a bit, and so I kept refreshing the webpage only to see it falling about 3 cents in 45 minutes (that's huge, by the way). I went to bed and figured it would have leveled out by morning.
It didn't. It went free-falling from $1.62 last night to about $1.54 as I'm writing...
It's kind of like Christmas: you go to bed and then wake up with a pretty awesome surprise.Normally, I am hardly interested in international currency markets--in fact, the only class I have ever dropped in college was one by that very name (sorry, Dr. Kohl's)--but needing to watch finances closely here, I have had no choice but to keep watch over the exchange rate. For the past four years, the Great British Pound Sterling's (GBP) value has hovered around $1.80 to $2.00. Ironically, the week I decided to study in London, the GBP hit a high for 2008 of almost $2.02. London is already depressingly expensive, but the dollar's weakness was going to make it even worse.
Then the whole financial crisis hit, and it has been much harder on the UK and Europe than on the US. London has been beaten up especially bad. In the past month, London home prices have plummeted almost 25% on average. Layoff sprees are more and more common, banks are going under, and the fact that the wealthy nations of the EU have to bail out the poorer Eastern European nations, too, has meant that both the GBP and the Euro are skydiving. This is horrible for Great Britain and Europe, but for the first time in at least five years, American tourists and students like me can smile. Yes, Gordon Brown, this is schadenfreude...
The GBP to the USD over the past three months. In case you're interested in seeing some graphs--the Euro's fall is equally striking--then check out http://finance.yahoo.com/currency.
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