Hints and tips:
...Harold Wilson’s devaluation of sterling in 1967 haunted Labour until Tony Blair became leader, while it took the global financial crisis to repair the damage the Conservative party suffered from the UK’s...
...Job moves Linklaters has hired veteran dealmaker George Casey, a global managing partner at Shearman & Sterling, as UK “magic circle” firms seek a stronger footing in the US....
...He begins with the so-called golden age in the 1950s and 1960s, when the prime minister Harold Macmillan reflected the country’s postwar boom in his “never had it so good” remark....
...By 1997, the boom in the economy saw sterling trading back up at around $1.70, up 20 per cent from the low it reached following Black Wednesday....
...Macmillan had to change tack when, as chancellor, he realised that the US, which opposed the action, could undermine sterling, causing the British economy to collapse....
...Those were the days when what Harold Wilson called “a tightly-knit group of politically motivated men” could bring a whole industry to a standstill....
...The slow, inexorable decline was, moreover, punctuated by acute short-term crises: the Suez fiasco in 1956; the seven-week miners’ strike of 1972; the regularly unnerving collapse of sterling....
...It was no coincidence that the devaluation that was forced on Harold Wilson’s government in 1967 sounded the final retreat from imperial pretensions with the subsequent withdrawal of British forces from...
...Harold Wilson’s incoming Labour government of 1964 went some way in this direction and Brittan was one of those recruited....
...He cut off Britain’s access to international financial support for sterling....
...The value of sterling is so central to national events that it even plays a role in Netflix’s new series of The Crown, where Harold Wilson is shown as a prime minister desperate to secure US financial support...
...After sterling’s devaluation in 1967, Harold Wilson’s government beat an enforced retreat from the last outposts of empire east of Suez....
...Harold Macmillan, having replaced Eden as British prime minister after Suez, took a more hard-headed view....
...In the mid-1960s, buoyant with popularity, Harold Wilson should have been addressing an embryonic sterling crisis when he was politically strong....
...James Callaghan, chancellor of the exchequer at the time in Harold Wilson’s government, dismissed the idea on the basis that “it will only cause trouble”....
...The shock of the subsequent 8 per cent fall in the pound against the dollar on the day after the referendum — still the largest daily decline since 1967 when prime minister Harold Wilson’s government devalued...
...Then as now, a strong currency was essential, and William could not let his conflict with Harold Godwinson, the Anglo-Saxon king, cripple England’s economy....
...The years between Black Wednesday, when sterling crashed out of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism, in 1992 and the financial crisis in 2007 are mostly absent from the book. This is a shame....
...It was a poor trade performance that forced Harold Wilson’s Labour government to devalue the pound in 1967, and trade also played a role in the pound’s fall in the mid-1970s....
...The Conservative party’s attachment to Europe — it had been Harold Macmillan who first proposed EU membership and Edward Heath who oversaw entry — was broken....
...Those with longer memories recall how sterling falls are often linked to moments of shock to the UK psyche: Harold Wilson’s 1967 devaluation, the IMF bailout in 1976, Northern Rock in 2007....
...The three economists Nicky Kaldor, Thomas Balogh and Wynn Godley convinced prime minister Harold Wilson to dump sterling so as to increase exports and thereby stimulate the ailing UK economy....
...fixed exchange rate, their political credibility really was at stake — as John Major, then UK prime minister, found with the departure from the European Exchange Rate Mechanism in 1992 and, before him, Harold...
...Former prime minister Harold Macmillan grew up at number 52 What you can buy for . . ....
...However, sterling’s weakness also drove up cost pressures, with purchase price inflation remaining above its long-run average, although the pace of growth was lower than a record high hit in January....
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