Sterling remained steady against most of its major competitors over the past 24 hours while clawing back some of last week’s losses against the non-US dollars.
The first week of September has been unseasonably quiet this year. In the first week of September 2020 there was a 2.5% drop compared to EUR, and the previous three years there were modest but determined rises in the strength of sterling compared to the single currency. Not this year, however.
In the business news today, a report from the UK’s Insolvency Service has shown employers planning fewer job cuts than expected, meaning that a surge in unemployment as the furlough scheme ends looks less likely.
The third runway at Heathrow has had a major barrier removed as the Department for Transport has refused to allow green concerns to delay the project.
At the other end of the country, in Northumberland Britishvolt started work on Europe’s second-only Gigaplant, able to build 300,000 electric car batteries per year.
European stock markets had their strongest day for six weeks as the reverberations of America’s very poor employment data on Friday (non-farm payrolls) continued. If high unemployment continues, goes the thinking, so must government assistance, with no tapering of stimulus expected.
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