I saw a headline in The Sun yesterday, which reads:
Bank of England holds off on interest rate cut and sends pound soaring
They used this graphic to illustrate the phenomenon:
You have to bear in mind that The Sun is ultra right-wing, and was ultra pro-brexit. It spent the entire time leading up to the referendum twisting information, printing stories about immigrants and crime, and defaming anyone who aired pro-EU sentiments.
Please allow me to show you a factual graph representing GBP versus USD over recent weeks using real financial data sources.
The high point on the left is the pre-referendum price (over $1.483 to the £). The end of the graph marks the price at the end of trading on yesterday (the dotted line indicates $1.317 to the £).
Key points to note are as follows:
- the £ is currently $0.166 lower than it was before the referendum
- the current value of the £ is a direct result of the referendum outcome
- the £ is currently down 11.2% from its pre-referendum value
- its lowest point was 13% below the pre-referendum value
- it is currently up about 1.8% from its lowest value
- it hasn’t “soared”
If you look carefully, The Sun’s graphic is similar to the real financial data-based one – but not identical. There is a double peak centred around the 12th and 14th of this month, but there is certainly no level plateau around the 9th and 10th. And there is nowhere near as much fluctuation (fluctuation occurs over a day, but the daily figure quoted is the closing price). However, they have purposely only quoted data that makes the graph look good – like this:
This is just the end data on the larger graph I showed above. It seems to tell a completely different story, doesn’t it? And look what happens if you squeeze it – here’s the same part of the graph, but made narrower:
It really does look like it is “soaring” – but it is identical to the one above as far as the numbers are concerned.
This is the kind of manipulation The Sun excels at, and which it uses to control the minds of most of its readers. It’s one of the main reasons why we ended up with such a stupidly wrong referendum result – it’s what you get when you allow stupid people to vote on things they don’t understand, and allow dishonest people to advise them.
British Pound Likely to Head Higher before it Drops