This article makes a lot of sense.

Though my holiday in Greece next year may cost more, that's a small price to pay for a rebalanced economy that will eventually benefit a broader swathe of the UK population.
We just need to figure how to handle that border in Ireland!

Best wishes to you both and thanks for your great service.

David Fuller's view

Thanks for your email and kind words.

Here is the opening of the article by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, and a section of the conclusion, as not all Subscribers will be able to access the link above.  I will also have a PDF of the article in the Subscriber’s Area:

The slump in sterling is a blessing in disguise after years of overvaluation and helps to break the corrosive stranglehold of the financial elites over the British economy, according to a former bail-out chief for the International Monetary Fund.

“It is desirable from every point of view. The idea that Britain is in crisis or is on its knees before the exchange rate vigilantes is ludicrous,” said Ashoka Mody, the IMF’s former deputy-director for Europe and now at Princeton University.

“The UK economy is rebalancing amazingly well. It is a stunning achievement that a once-in-fifty-year event should have gone to smoothly,” he told the Telegraph.

Professor Mody, who led the EU-IMF Troika rescue for Ireland, said the pound had been driven up to nose-bleed levels from 2011 to 2015 by global property speculators and the banking elites acting in destructive synergy, causing serious damage to Britain’s manufacturing base and long-term competitiveness.

The role of the City as the unrivalled financial centre of Europe made it a magnet for speculative property flows from Russia, China, the Mid-East, and the wider world, a bubble that was further leveraged by cheap dollar credit though global banks operating in London.

“It was essentially a bank-property nexus, and the rest of the economy was left to suffer. It is stunning that just 1.4pc of all loans were going to the manufacturing sector,” he said.

And:

A weaker currency has lost its ability to frighten in a deflationary world where most of the major advanced states or economic blocs are trying to drive down their exchange rates to break out of the liquidity trap. Britain has inadvertently stolen a march in an undeclared global currency war.

For the fragile eurozone economy, the opposite dynamic is playing out. The pound is one of the largest components of the euro’s trade-weighted index, and the 20pc fall since late last year has the side-effect of further tightening the deflationary noose.

The exchange rate has now fallen so far that most eurozone exporters selling into Britain can no longer absorb the currency effect by shaving their profit margins. They increasingly face the risk of declining sales and market share.  

Prof Mody said eurozone leaders may be on thinner ice than they care to admit. “They are in a debt-deflation cycle, and it is self-reinforcing,” he said.

French president Francois Hollande has now openly stated that his desired policy is to “threaten” Britain and make the country “pay a price”. The more he succeeds, the more painful the blowback into France.

I maintain that weaker sterling and successful fracking in the UK represent the long missing economic stimulants which can turn the central and northern regions of the UK back into a manufacturing powerhouse over the next decade.  

Here is a PDF of AE-P's column.