Pound weaker versus USD, yen, euro during session

The pound lost ground to the US dollar, the yen and the euro on Wednesday, although in afternoon trade in New York it got back a bit of its losses to the Japanese currency after Mervyn King’s comments that the Bank of England could begin to buy corporate bonds and commercial paper to shore up UK businesses after the next meeting of its Monetary Policy Committee on 5 February.

The Bank is expected to cut interest rates to 1 percent on that date after the minutes of its last meeting showed that the sole member of the committee who did not vote for the half percentage point cut made then had asked for a full one percentage point cut in rates.

In mid-afternoon trade in New York the pound traded at 93.7p to the euro while it took $1.3738 or ¥121.7269 to buy a pound.

The yen backed off its earlier gains versus the greenback and the shared currency, trading at ¥88.605 to the dollar and at ¥114.0641 to the euro.

Meanwhile, the Swiss franc declined in relation to the euro to SFr1.4929 to the shared currency after a Swiss National Bank official said the Swiss central bank could intervene to stop the franc from strengthening too much.

Story link: Pound weaker versus USD, yen, euro during session