‘The jewel has lost its shine’: how the world reacted to the UK’s pound crisis
International reaction to the turmoil in the financial markets which saw the pound fall to its lowest level ever against the dollar is devastating in its condemnation of the new government’s policies, and the astonishment and shock focused in particular on the chancellor’s willingness to experiment with one of the world’s most stable economies.
In the US, criticism was led by the former US treasury secretary Larry Summers, who took to Twitter to attack what he called the “utterly irresponsible UK policy”, expressing at the same time his surprise that the markets had reacted so quickly and harshly. He said this in itself indicated a loss of credibility.
<p lang=«en» dir=«ltr» xml:lang=«en»>I was very pessimistic about the consequences of utterly irresponsible UK policy on Friday. But, I did not expect markets to get so bad so fast. A strong tendency for long rates to go up as the currency goes down is a hallmark of situations where credibility has been lost.His long thread concluded with the gloomy prediction that the financial crisis in Britain would not only have an effect on “London’s viability as a global financial centre”, but “could well have global consequences”.
In the New Yorker, John Cassidy wrote that the crisis was all the more disturbing for Britain as it came so soon after the death of Queen Elizabeth II, “their last remaining link to a time when their schoolbook maps showed great swaths of the earth’s surface coloured imperial red”. Now, he said, “they face a humiliating currency crisis”.
He said that the prime minister, Liz Truss, and her chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng, had plunged Britain into a “fine economic mess”.
“The tragedy,” Cassidy insisted, “is that all this is unnecessary. Although Britain has been
Read more on theguardian.com
