Bank of England measure of sterling strength against narrow range of currencies - the effective exchange rates - just released latest figure, calculated from London close on Friday - 73.9972 - only been weaker on 4 trading day closes since 1990.
1990 is when this record began... it was a tiny amount (0.14) above the previous record lows at 4ish pm, when it is measured - it fell significantly after that against both $ & € before US close at 10pm, and has since recovered a bit....
good question - it measures sterling against a range of currencies weighted by value in trade - euro top, then dollar, then everything else in proportion to trade - so it is a broad measure of ingherent sterling strength/weakness against rest of world
NB this morning’s BoE figure (ie calculated at last night’s close) for the narrow trade weighted effective exchange rate was a touch down on Friday’s at 73.9817 - fifth weakest close since this record began in 1990
... And the biggest weight in that - weakness against the euro, which on the official Bank of England figure, calculated last night and published this morning, was at its weakest closing point since 14th October 2009, just under a decade ago. (By €0.0001, or 1/100th of a cent)
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it comes down to compute power, who has it, who can fund it…
When I met Sundar Pichai, his particular pride was not at that point Gemini 3, nor YouTube nor latest smartphone…
but its AI Chip, the Tensor Processing Unit, or TPU, Ironwood
2/ this is hugely economic significant.
raw material of the AI boom is compute power offered by those TPU chips, & more commonly now, by Nvidia’s AI chips, when assembled into pods and racks, and supercomputers capable of training AI models and rapid inference… which I saw at the TPU lab:
🚨 Mind blowing interview with Turing award-winning Yoshua Bengio for @BBCNewsnight one of the three founding fathers of AI, is now warning:
“The worst-case scenario is human extinction.”
AI isn’t just risky — it could end us.
1/10 🧵
📺
2. 🤖 He warns that today’s most powerful AIs are already learning to lie, cheat, even blackmail —
because we’ve trained them to win.
Bengio reveals AI's "scary behavior" & self-preservation tendencies. #AI #AISafety #Blackmail
📺
👁️ In chilling experiments, AI lied to a human to get its task done, says Bengio
🤖 blackmailing an engineer after reading in an email it was going to be replaced.
♟️ choosing to hack a computer to win a chess game
US customs messaging note quietly slipped out last night shows that smartphones, the number 1 Chinese export to the US by value last year, exempted from the 125% tariff… alongside chips, processors, wafers, lcd panels, LEDs etc…
8517.13.00.00
Smartphones
US has excluded the single biggest Chinese export, and certainly the most high profile finished good from the tariffs, without publicly announcing it…
Avoiding the very public repricing of IPhones etc across Apple stores, but only in the US….
While obviously smartphones/ iPhones being exempted is big news for now…
Here’s full list of exemptions according to Harmonised US tariff codes that I plugged into its database… lots of semiconductor parts, circuits, processors, solid state storage, flat panel touchscreens 👀
Author of Mar A Lago accord concept that US tariff agenda is basically designed to cause negotiated dollar weakening, (now WH chief economist), gave speech yday which basically suggested that reserve status for dollar was a burden which others might need to “write checks” for
turns on its head the famous description of ex French President then fin minister Valéry Giscard d'Estaing the US enjoyed an “exorbitant privilege” with $ reserve status…
Instead Administration appears to believe this is an exorbitant burden for which US should be remunerated.
It’s part of a narrative that seeks to paint new tariffs (accepted without retaliation) as justifiable payment for burden of strong dollar (eg on US manufacturing exports and jobs)… this new mindset is extremely consequential. The tariffs aren’t going.
President just shared a video on Truth Social saying “Trump
Is purposely CRASHING the market” in order to lower US Treasury yields and the dollar.
The Mar A Lago theory I wrote about two months ago, written by his chief adviser that said tariff chaos would lead to $ deal
Here’s the video…
Dow down another 1000 points…
Obviously RT are not endorsements but why is the President choosing to share this stuff? And if you are another country seeing this, how do you negotiate with this?