The back end of 2008 and the first few months of 2009, were, in economic terms, disasterous, not just in the UK and the United States, but across the world.

When the banking system started to collapse, both the British Prime Minister and the American President poured in money to keep them open. At the start of the process, backing the banks with billions of pounds and trillions of dollars, brought the pound and the dollar crashing down in the financial markets. Despite this support in the United States, the dollar has not yet recovered from the credit crunch and the economic crisis that is affecting businesses and individuals in almost every state.

At the beginning of this year the pound didn’t seem to be doing very much and prophets of doom were everywhere, but in the last three or four months the pound has started to climb back up again. The pound is gradually increasing in strength against the dollar, which is good news for the country as a whole, but bad news for freelance workers on this side of the Atlantic who get paid in dollars.

In direct contradiction to what financial experts and doom merchants have predicted, the pound continues to increase in strength. At the start of this economic crisis unemployment figures were getting worse every day and the property market took a nose dive. In the early months of this year the financial future of Britain looked very stark, while it is still too early to say which way things will go, at the moment, the economic crisis is certainly not getting any worse, and the increasing strength of the pound tends to suggest that things might get better.
 

Until recently, the media was full of news about the increase in unemployment figures, the near collapse of the banks, the collapse of businesses, the housing market, and the drop in the value of the pound. At the moment, the media is not giving a clear picture about the economic state of the nation because all of the news is taken up with politics, particularly the problems within the Labour Party. In spite of the lack of media information, anyone who follows the financial indexes can clearly see that the pound is now up against both the dollar and the euro. Although the property market has not yet showed signs of recovery, the drop in house prices appears to have slowed down dramatically.

We still have a credit crunch and it is difficult for businesses and individuals to get a bank loan. While it might be too early to say that this is the start of an economic recovery period, if the pound continues to increase in strength as it has over the last few months, then we might be approaching an economic upturn.