The pound has staged its biggest moves on record as a majority of UK voters voted to leave the EU.
At an intraday low of $1.3229 – its lowest level since September 1985 – sterling was down as much 11.1 per cent from its New York close of $1.4877 on Thursday, writes Peter Wells .
That is nearly double the next-biggest intraday drop of 5.9 per cent on October 24 2008, a day when stock markets around the world collapsed, during the depths of the financial crisis. Even the events of Black Wednesday, on September 16 1992, saw the pound down as much as 4 per cent at its intraday, and eventual closing, low.
Very early in the Asian session when the earliest polls were showing support for the remain camp, sterling was up by as much as 1 per cent. That takes the whole high-to-low trading range for June 24, thus far, to 12.1 per cent.
This is the largest intraday range on record, according to FT calculations with intraday data going back to the start of 1989 from Bloomberg . It is nearly double the next-biggest intraday range of 6.5 per cent on October 24 2008.
But on that October day, sterling pared its intraday decline to end just 2.1 per cent lower. It will take a momentous effort for the pound to replicate the performance.
At 6.45am London time on Friday, sterling is fetching $1.35, putting it down 9.3 per cent for the day. Anything more than a 4.1 per cent drop – the tumble on Black Wednesday in 1992 – by the close of trade on Friday will lock in what looks almost certain to be the pound biggest one-day fall on record, according to our analysis of daily data going back to 1971 from Bloomberg .
That some of these moves – intraday fall, intraday range and the likely decline by close – are roughly twice the magnitude of the next-biggest falls speak to immense and record volatility of the currency today.