Love it. The line "unaware of all this" and the following anecdote about the driver knowing all about it because he simply listened to the radio... gold. Sums up our politicians nicely. So wrapped up in their own world that they don't even think to put an ear to the ground and see what the real world is doing.
That's an unfair assessment This was a fast-moving crisis, and there was no rolling news, let alone smartphones There should have been advisors to tell them exactly what was happening in the markets These are democratic politicians managing crises, they knew to listen to what was actually happening Though it is funny that the driver told them because he had the radio and no-one else seemed to be listening
30:57 - The silence after the interviewer asked her "did anyone think it would work" - rising the interest rates a second time, her silence says it all.
Unfortunately though - the whole of the media and the political class(don't forget Labour with John Smith as then Shadow Chancellor, the Lib Dems, SNP and PC were all big supporters of it - and calling on the UK to join it) - the only person objecting was someone like Alan Waters(Thatcher's old economics advisor) - and he had to be sacked as Lawson didn't agree with him. It just shows that when the counter argument is suppressed - how devasting the consequences are in our political system.
@@splinterbyrd And ironically people praise Ken Clarke as some sort of wonder Chancellor - when he was a big supporter of the ERM before he took that position from Lamont.
@alphabetaxenonzzzcat It was more justifiable at a lower DM level perhaps Clarke still believes in joining a single currency, because the fluctuating exchange rates are a barrier to trade and a cost It does require careful economic management I'm not sure the British economy is 'fit enough' to be in such a scheme
it's ok - personally i thought there were a lot of gaps?? maybe I missed it but how many countries were in the ERM with UK at this time? Just Italy and Germany?
@@paulmulligan2895 Also France, the Benelux countries, Ireland and Denmark. The UK entered the ERM in 1990, but was forced to withdraw on Black Wednesday 1992.
@@joshfgfgWhich part was propaganda? And what does it matter what you call it as long as it's true? I've noticed this way of arguing where just calling something is enough to discredit it. Please, offer evidence instead of name calling. Lazy and shallow.
I was much younger then days and had no idea how the economy functioned. After the 2008 disaster, I educated myself. Watching this now I find myself in a state of shock and horror at the utter incompetence of the British MPs and prime minister. Even a bungling amateur finance sleuth could have done better. I often wonder if MPs were held financially accountable for their mistakes how many of them would be in politics at all. I suspect that more than half the population have no idea how Black Wednesday happened even after watching this and they have no idea of the dire consequences they, the public would have to pay. This is why I feel strongly that all schools should include finance and banking in its curriculum. As long as the majority of the public, who are not involved in finance, does not understand how the economy works, then crashes will continue to happen again and again and it will always be the poor and working class who will pay the price with their blood.
I regret not having taken economics at GCSE level, when offered the opportunity, for this exact reason. It was much later when I actually began to understand even the rudiments as to how the things touched upon in this documentary actually work.
The Government would go on to lose to 208 MP's in March of 97 and Blair would come to power with majority of 172. The REAL problem is venture and monetary speculation that set up vulnerable currency's and squeeze a few billion out for a few folks who don't pay taxes and don't have allegiances. This is the problem not the ERM itself or even the BOE's response. The speculation market is full of a few A$$holes who unless you have a reserve currency like the dollar will screw you and set up the parameters post facto.
Rewatching in Jan 2021 and the government imposed coronavirus confinement is still going with no end in sight... Seems like our government are intent on killing the economy and bankrupting the country to save less than 1000 old people
@@voice.of.reason saying the measures are only to save 1,000 people is a lie. 100,000 have died when recently tested positive for COVID. And before you question the figure the excess deaths show that most of those people were sent to an early grave by the disease. Also old people are people, you are clearly showing how ageist and discriminatory you appear to be. I hope when you are old and vulnerable society and those who are supposed to care for you show you the compassion you fail to display now.
Some might even say a Kubrickian touch. "There was me, that is John, and my three droogs, that is Michael, Douglas and Ken, and we sat in the Admiralty House trying to make up our rassoodocks what to do with the Sterling..."
The program ended with the wrong lesson. Germany joined the euro at a low exchange rate and has flourished since. It wasn't a currency pact per se that did in John Major. It was the fact that he joined the mechanism at too high a rate.
I remember it well I'd just bought my first house. Events had a. Major negative effect on my dad's pension which affected him for the rest of his life. Great documentary thanks.
The insanity of having to be informed by your driver or to find a transistor radio to keep in touch with the exchanges or whatever is mind-boggling I know they didn't have the internet and stuff back then but still direct communication phones was going on here
MantasiaHater if you think about it , it all started early in the video, when a politician decided how much the sterling would be worth vs the german... they said, you idiot that is too high, oh too late, we already wrote that down, accept, of course when you start at overpriced pound, the shorts will come in and force you down to its intrinsic value, no matter how much you raise rates, your currency is a measure of your economy strength in aggregate, and not what number some politicians think it should be... pure idiocy.
I find it incredible that the Govt & BoE didn't understand how the currency markets would perceive their actions (rate rises seen as weakness instead of strength, as was hoped). They had no understanding of how the markets think.
This shows how brilliant and prescient The Day Today was. That graphic with the kites is like the Currency Kidney... with a negative flow of waste pounds across all international membranes...
Not to mention the cast numbers of investors it made unspeakably rich basically overnight. Yeah pension pits took a bit of a hit, but they recovered pretty rapidly, but otherwise this was one of the greatest wealth redistribution events of the 1990s.
Perhaps it's not that we never learn... but that we're not very good at transmitting lessons learned from one generation to another...the established methodology is faulty... maybe
@@sylestermajor783 Every FC is different. That's the real issue. You can't learn from a handful of examples because no two examples are exactly alike. Apart from the term FC you can't draw any parallels with 2008. These people were having afternoon tea blissfully unaware of the rampant selling that was going on of the £. They didn't even have access to a radio, let alone satellite TV or any news info for that matter. You can be assured that more crises will come - just in different locations, in different shapes. These are the sorts of things you get for trying to be too smart. People aren't smart creatures.
As soon as I saw George Soro's after the mentioning of profiting from a countries failure (something he is known for orchestrating) you knew this was going to be interesting.
+Paulo Sousa That's how they did it in 1992. No mobile phones. No internet. No 24 hour rolling news channels. So radio would have been far more important,. There were hardly any alternative sources for breaking news,if you were on the move.
Gaur1983 so u telling me that the Bank of England would inform first the radio stations than the government? Is that how they do business back then? I doubt it m8
+Paulo Sousa No. But at the time Ministers probably didn't feel it necessary to follow minute by minute the ups and downs of the financial markets. Also,while the markets were open,the Bank of England dealers and officials probably had too much on their plates -buying pounds and trying(and failing) to persuade the Germans to weaken their own currency ,by selling Deutschmarks or lowering interest rates - to immediately get in touch with ministers by phone.
13:00 first they decided unilaterally the interest rate, then they commanded Germany to save them. This imperial attitude out of time, the inability to cooperate, vastly displayed in b4exit drama, and will be in decades
Negative equity was caused not by the ERM, but by removing 'Double' MIRAS, whereby everybody could deduct mortgage interest before tax. There was a rush to buy before September 1989, which sent prices up by a third in my part of SE22... Still, good to know that Thatcher was responsible. Thank God for the fearless, unbiased, reporting of the BBC ;-p Even at the time we all knew it was a mistake; on the day, when rates first went up, I remember working out my mortgage payments, and we were broke. When it went up a second time that day, I knew everybody was bust, so we opened a bottle of champagne.
I think it was the first time the British recognized that Germany was Europe's leading economy. It wasn't the German's aligning with the British, it was the British aligning itself with the Germans.
Britain was the sick man of Europe by the 1970s and would fall far behind West Germany, France and even got overtaken by Italy for a short period of time. I disagree
@@susanlansdell863 The same people who told you that joining the ERM would be great for the British economy (it was a total disaster) and that Britain not joining the Euro would be disastrous (it wasn't at all) have now been telling you that Brexit would be catastrophic for the British economy. Why on earth would you believe people who have been so constant and consistently wrong?? It's obviously just a scare tactic to trick you into giving up your sovereignty to a European superstate.
Do I understand correctly? The British couple the Pound with the German currency without any pre arrangements and then expect Germany to adjust its financial politics to British preference? It's not the European common currency that doesn't work, it's British hubris and arrogance!
The ERM was not gonna work so crashing out was probably a good choice As for the common currency the question is whether it works for those still inside it
@@vinniechan well regardless, Britain insisting on getting their way and then not being granted favours to bail them out is a classic example of how the perception of being a powerful colonial power still is present in British foreign politics despite there not being any colonial power left. This is the same mechanism which lead to BREXIT as well as Black Wednesday. It will happen again and again unless British foreign policy will be controlled by someone a bit less arrogant and a bit more realistic on the international stage. Britain is just a country as every other major EU member and has to act accordingly. If it doesn't, no wonder it does not work. But it's not the EU's fault, it is Britain's fault and Britain's fault alone.
The documentary needs to be about the money printing that props up the stock market for the rich and is going to inevitably lead to the mother of all crashes
4:53 - Clever wording by Thatcher here to hide her true thoughts. She said she wished John Major "all the luck in the world", not good luck, bad luck she wished him. Very obvious.
The same sort of blundering by Politicians is happening over leaving the EU. They did not have a clue why they did it nor the consequences of doing it.
That's what happens when voters and politicians react emotionally rather than logically. Often, your emotions don't think further than 5 feet ahead, so to speak.
Norman Lamont knew exactly what he was doing in Bath. He knew that Major was going to fly his ERM policy plane on a kamikaze mission into the teeth of the coming guns that became Black Wednesday. He further knew the only way out of the ERM was to let him do it. He knew full well nothing short of a cataclysm was going to get the pound out of the ERM, and Britain's economic and financial woes were not going to end until they got out. So, he went to Bath, antagonized the Bundesbank managers, and didn't get so much as tea and biscuits from them. I think his plan was evidenced by his words to someone the next day (Thursday) when asked how his evening had been. Lamont said he slept like a baby, now that Britain was out of the ERM. Yeah, Lamont was playing a bit of a double game, giving full throated support to a policy he didn't like, while moving things in the direction he knew they had to go in order to get out, no matter the bloodletting.
John Major as chancellor? When he left school he failed the entrance exam for London Transport,his mathematics was obviously not good enough. 30 odd years later he put VAT on heating fuel,breaking an election promise.
Better than Gordon Brown... that guy had a PhD or masters thesis, in the history of the labour party or some such nonsense and then ended up with the keys to the treasury. He was about as qualified for the job as any man on the street was. i.e. not remotely.
I was there, 1987 wasn’t the crash the media would have you believe. All we lost was the huge run up the previous 9 months and 2 years later we were trading above the 1987 peak.
The incompetence shown by government makes me feel so angry and frustrated. Any market stall trader could do a better job in understanding the economy and these career politician rats are looking back and laughing about it with dumb smiles on their faces.
Two years later I was a journalist who discovered the Bundesbank HQ in Frankfurt was filled with British-made asbestos.. acoustic panels and sound proofing, etc. One third of the HQ was being torn out, bit by bit, in sequence, at huge cost. Ironically the contractors were British - they had the most experience in removing it. The Germans denied it flatly, fearing embarrassment. I produced documents from the contractor - they still denied it. We published.. they Germans weren't pleased..
Jeff Green ; It was front page headline news in the US although the name "Soros" was the prominent name used. To this day he is despised by Poms because he made fools of them.
What a colossal failure of British monetary policy ! The whole episode would have been avoided if the Brits had started with a more reasonable peg rate, and matched the interest rate policies of the Deutschmark.
I feel for the British politicians, many of them at the time had inherited the ERM mechanism that they didn't actually want. Now they were left trying to save their currency and their people. The Bank of England tried their best, but you can't fight the private sector sentiments!
Fair enough but don't forget it's ultimately the people who suffer as most politicians are millionaire's before they are even born due to their families wealth. Unfortunately they find it all too easy to lose everyone else's money as it doesn't affect them.
I still can't understand why the UK was allowed to enter the mechanism a an inflated rate they dictated, with relatively no opposition. How was there so little governance?
I think this is explained quite well here. The UK said what the rate was going to be and then just announced it. There’s not really anything you can do to counter that, other than put out your own statement contradicting the UK and kicking off the mother of all media storms that drags everyone down at the same time.
This ERM disaster in the long term was a blessing to the UK, we didn't join the EURO, in 1999 so thank god for that, the 4 billion that the government burned to save the pound was a price worth paying, I remember the European parliament putting intense pressure on the UK to join the EURO, so glad we didn't.
The fact that these politicians can make financial decisions of this measure when they can't even run a bath is both amusing and baffling. In fact, it's incredible. Liz Trust literally made a similar decision when she was in charge for about 2 hours :) No wonder traders can make a fortune off the back of these idiots.
They’ve always out of touch, they only ordered funding for a new London sewer in 1858 because they could smell the sh*t filled river thames from parliament
I mean the whole point of this was to eliminate the exchange rate which basically acted as an artificial commodity standard. Britain had to float the pound, making it more of a fiat currency not less. And as the documentary pointed out, the result was an improvement in the economy and low inflation. Fiat rules, fixed rate and commodity currencies absolutely suffocate policy choices.
"it was Thatcher's fault, but she didn't want to do it and she was kind of forced to do it", we get it BBC, you hate margret thatcher and make up lies to smear her.
history will repeat itself... goes up slowly making new highs...crash in a few months...then goes back up making newer highs... until 'the end' when planet earth ends due to human causes
Love it. The line "unaware of all this" and the following anecdote about the driver knowing all about it because he simply listened to the radio... gold. Sums up our politicians nicely. So wrapped up in their own world that they don't even think to put an ear to the ground and see what the real world is doing.
When the driver knows more than the entire gov.
Here's one of the "minister gets informed about the situation by his driver" scenes from "Yes, Minister": th-cam.com/video/0nqAXszK78U/w-d-xo.html
That's an unfair assessment
This was a fast-moving crisis, and there was no rolling news, let alone smartphones
There should have been advisors to tell them exactly what was happening in the markets
These are democratic politicians managing crises, they knew to listen to what was actually happening
Though it is funny that the driver told them because he had the radio and no-one else seemed to be listening
@@ReneSchickbauery thoughts turned to the same season.
i miss intelligent programmes like this from the BBC. what a shambles it has become today.
old fogey 'they-don't-make-em-like-they-used-to'' comment.
@Blowing Whistle well obviously, duhhh ! that's the point.
(dumbass)
Blowing Whistle it's not a troll or idiot comment, it's the fucking truth
they haven't left the bbc, and the beeb isn't in shambles
Same here in Germany, I miss them old ones too. But back then we had ppl complaining "what a shame it has become today" too and that p.ssed me off
I still cannot stop laughing at McKenzie's impression of Major ....hilarious xD
At 44.30 yes it was rather prol - but apt. "You are a wag."
Absolutely mythical . XD ^^
that was absolute gold
44:30 is much better than 6:15
Bucket of shit, lol
30:57 - The silence after the interviewer asked her "did anyone think it would work" - rising the interest rates a second time, her silence says it all.
Uuuú
well, probabaly they did, at the time. everyone's smart post factum
I know a man, still alive, who bought his pension annuity at 15%....he is a very rich man indeed.
John Major's thought process; the UK was sliding into recession so lets take away the ability to devalue the currency by tying it to the DM. Genius!
It was about inflation
There has been inflation for 30yrs, and they thought this was part of the solution
And after we crashed out of the ERM, the British economy started to grow, and continued to do so for the rest of Major's premiership
Unfortunately though - the whole of the media and the political class(don't forget Labour with John Smith as then Shadow Chancellor, the Lib Dems, SNP and PC were all big supporters of it - and calling on the UK to join it) - the only person objecting was someone like Alan Waters(Thatcher's old economics advisor) - and he had to be sacked as Lawson didn't agree with him.
It just shows that when the counter argument is suppressed - how devasting the consequences are in our political system.
@@splinterbyrd And ironically people praise Ken Clarke as some sort of wonder Chancellor - when he was a big supporter of the ERM before he took that position from Lamont.
@alphabetaxenonzzzcat It was more justifiable at a lower DM level perhaps
Clarke still believes in joining a single currency, because the fluctuating exchange rates are a barrier to trade and a cost
It does require careful economic management
I'm not sure the British economy is 'fit enough' to be in such a scheme
"It failed to bring instant prosperity", well I'm shocked shocked.
me too... I'm shocked! shocked!... there's gambling goin' on here!
When does anything ever bring "instant prosperity,"
And old folk had their pensions completely burnt .
They risked peoples futures who had worked all of their lives . ABSOLUTELY DISGUSTING BEHAVIOUR 😳
A very well done documentary, even I, as a layman, understood it perfectly. That's how it should be done, methodically explaining each step.
it's ok - personally i thought there were a lot of gaps?? maybe I missed it but how many countries were in the ERM with UK at this time? Just Italy and Germany?
@@paulmulligan2895 Also France, the Benelux countries, Ireland and Denmark. The UK entered the ERM in 1990, but was forced to withdraw on Black Wednesday 1992.
@@SelfReflective thank you
Yes it’s great, if you dont notice blatant propaganda.
@@joshfgfgWhich part was propaganda? And what does it matter what you call it as long as it's true? I've noticed this way of arguing where just calling something is enough to discredit it. Please, offer evidence instead of name calling. Lazy and shallow.
Thanks for posting, love these BBC financial documentaries from the 90's
Albeit a little 'propagandaesque'....
Hello, from 9 Years in the future :)
I was much younger then days and had no idea how the economy functioned. After the 2008 disaster, I educated myself. Watching this now I find myself in a state of shock and horror at the utter incompetence of the British MPs and prime minister. Even a bungling amateur finance sleuth could have done better. I often wonder if MPs were held financially accountable for their mistakes how many of them would be in politics at all. I suspect that more than half the population have no idea how Black Wednesday happened even after watching this and they have no idea of the dire consequences they, the public would have to pay. This is why I feel strongly that all schools should include finance and banking in its curriculum. As long as the majority of the public, who are not involved in finance, does not understand how the economy works, then crashes will continue to happen again and again and it will always be the poor and working class who will pay the price with their blood.
@Crypto Knight Well said!
An excellent take. Well said.
I regret not having taken economics at GCSE level, when offered the opportunity, for this exact reason. It was much later when I actually began to understand even the rudiments as to how the things touched upon in this documentary actually work.
The Government would go on to lose to 208 MP's in March of 97 and Blair would come to power with majority of 172. The REAL problem is venture and monetary speculation that set up vulnerable currency's and squeeze a few billion out for a few folks who don't pay taxes and don't have allegiances. This is the problem not the ERM itself or even the BOE's response. The speculation market is full of a few A$$holes who unless you have a reserve currency like the dollar will screw you and set up the parameters post facto.
@@quincynufcIf you had taken economics you'd be as clueless as those at the BoE.
Rewatching in March 2020 during the coronavirus debacle...
Rewatching in Jan 2021 and the government imposed coronavirus confinement is still going with no end in sight... Seems like our government are intent on killing the economy and bankrupting the country to save less than 1000 old people
@@voice.of.reason dnt forget Brexit aswel
@@voice.of.reason watching end of January and American economy is corrupt to cater for billionaires
@@voice.of.reason saying the measures are only to save 1,000 people is a lie. 100,000 have died when recently tested positive for COVID. And before you question the figure the excess deaths show that most of those people were sent to an early grave by the disease. Also old people are people, you are clearly showing how ageist and discriminatory you appear to be. I hope when you are old and vulnerable society and those who are supposed to care for you show you the compassion you fail to display now.
@@voice.of.reason You sir, are a tosser.
I like the frequent use of Beethoven's music. Very nice touch.
I agree. The Eroica, the Pastorale, and the ninth ... very nice.
Some might even say a Kubrickian touch.
"There was me, that is John, and my three droogs, that is Michael, Douglas and Ken, and we sat in the Admiralty House trying to make up our rassoodocks what to do with the Sterling..."
What's the one playing at 43 minutes during the press announcement? exquisite.
Half Die Hard, half Clockwork Orange.
love old documentary.
The program ended with the wrong lesson. Germany joined the euro at a low exchange rate and has flourished since. It wasn't a currency pact per se that did in John Major. It was the fact that he joined the mechanism at too high a rate.
Hello, from 10 years in the future! :)
Excellent Programme - makes a very complex situation clear to the layman.
Thank you for posting these great looks back.
I remember it well I'd just bought my first house. Events had a. Major negative effect on my dad's pension which affected him for the rest of his life. Great documentary thanks.
Sorry to hear that about your dads pension . I taught myself to trade and with my skills I have a lifetime of capital ❤
@@Spliff66nice bro, I’m On my way to that :) currently working part time til then!
Raise the interest rate once was stupid but doing it twice was unbelievable.
Another display of the "adults in the room". These ppl gamble with whole generations and their future, and then they sit down to sip tea.
And we are called the speculators
Seriously😂
The insanity of having to be informed by your driver or to find a transistor radio to keep in touch with the exchanges or whatever is mind-boggling I know they didn't have the internet and stuff back then but still direct communication phones was going on here
Then 20 odd years later John Major trys to tell everyone staying in Europe is essential and expects people to take notice of him 🤣
4:39
"I refer the right-honorable gentleman to the response I gave some moments ago."
Basically, what this is telling us is that monetary policy NEEDS to be de-politicized. The UK government fucked up everything in this regard.
MantasiaHater if you think about it , it all started early in the video, when a politician decided how much the sterling would be worth vs the german... they said, you idiot that is too high, oh too late, we already wrote that down, accept, of course when you start at overpriced pound, the shorts will come in and force you down to its intrinsic value, no matter how much you raise rates, your currency is a measure of your economy strength in aggregate, and not what number some politicians think it should be... pure idiocy.
If only BBC can make such good documentaries again
Nonsense, they still do. If you found this interesting you might like this one 👍
th-cam.com/video/fhZgMkXO3jc/w-d-xo.html
@@chriswhitwood2858 fell asleep 3 times watching
Netflix has the documentary talent
I find it incredible that the Govt & BoE didn't understand how the currency markets would perceive their actions (rate rises seen as weakness instead of strength, as was hoped). They had no understanding of how the markets think.
how do you mean? every time central banks raise rates the currency becomes stronger.
Exact same thing with Liz Truss. She was told, numerous times, by experts and the markets what the reaction would be and she still ploughed on anyway.
33:29: The moment they collectively realised that a classic Eton / Oxbridge education was not quite enough to understand the realities of the markets.
This shows how brilliant and prescient The Day Today was. That graphic with the kites is like the Currency Kidney... with a negative flow of waste pounds across all international membranes...
It's amazing that they made a decision that affected a whole generation of citizens. They clearly didn't understand none of those consequences.
"It was a billion dollars.. it was in excess of a billion dollars profit" Amazing.
Ol' George
Massively shorting the pound and funding left wing political groups. This man is an enemy of Britain.
It was actually Wonderful Wednesday - the day we escaped the ERM and all the ill effects of an over-valued exchange rare.
Detox Wednesday
@@alexm566we certainly went ‘cold turkey’
Not to mention the cast numbers of investors it made unspeakably rich basically overnight. Yeah pension pits took a bit of a hit, but they recovered pretty rapidly, but otherwise this was one of the greatest wealth redistribution events of the 1990s.
44:05 One of the best John Major impressions ever.
Spitting image was the best
Lol
Sounded more like Kermit the Frog! 🤣
Fascinating...we never learn.
Perhaps it's not that we never learn... but that we're not very good at transmitting lessons learned from one generation to another...the established methodology is faulty... maybe
@@sylestermajor783 Every FC is different. That's the real issue. You can't learn from a handful of examples because no two examples are exactly alike. Apart from the term FC you can't draw any parallels with 2008. These people were having afternoon tea blissfully unaware of the rampant selling that was going on of the £. They didn't even have access to a radio, let alone satellite TV or any news info for that matter. You can be assured that more crises will come - just in different locations, in different shapes. These are the sorts of things you get for trying to be too smart. People aren't smart creatures.
Governments and central planners cannot manage currency and money... how many times will we have to be taught this painful lesson.
None of this would have happened if the boy hadn't wanted to feed the pigeons with his tuppence.
So the markets made millions and everyone else got a recession? Sounds familiar
i remember my friends father saying to his broker, " i'm destroyed". he had a long position in pound. and this was in Rawalpindi, Pakistan.
Did they recover?
As soon as I saw George Soro's after the mentioning of profiting from a countries failure (something he is known for orchestrating) you knew this was going to be interesting.
So the government had to rely on a radio to know what the hell was going on with the pound.. unfckenbelivable
It's not totally unbelievable at this time
+Paulo Sousa That's how they did it in 1992. No mobile phones. No internet. No 24 hour rolling news channels. So radio would have been far more important,. There were hardly any alternative sources for breaking news,if you were on the move.
Gaur1983 so u telling me that the Bank of England would inform first the radio stations than the government? Is that how they do business back then? I doubt it m8
+Paulo Sousa No. But at the time Ministers probably didn't feel it necessary to follow minute by minute the ups and downs of the financial markets.
Also,while the markets were open,the Bank of England dealers and officials probably had too much on their plates -buying pounds and trying(and failing) to persuade the Germans to weaken their own currency ,by selling Deutschmarks or lowering interest rates - to immediately get in touch with ministers by phone.
Gaur1983 If that's the way they used to deal with national emergencies back then... unbelievable.
And that man Georgie was at it again, like a rascal
13:00 first they decided unilaterally the interest rate, then they commanded Germany to save them. This imperial attitude out of time, the inability to cooperate, vastly displayed in b4exit drama, and will be in decades
"up and down like a whores drawers." LOL
It is Ken Clarke's casual almost disinterested amusement that gets me. Who in their right mind would take advice from this man ?
Hes awesome
Remainers.
EU: we can devalue our currency the fastest.
China: no, we can devalue our currency the fastest.
USA: Hold my beer.
CNY isn't a freely convertible currency so that is a moot point
US doesn't bother with the printing press any more just press a button in the computer
The Turkish lira is collapsing even faster
Negative equity was caused not by the ERM, but by removing 'Double' MIRAS, whereby everybody could deduct mortgage interest before tax. There was a rush to buy before September 1989, which sent prices up by a third in my part of SE22... Still, good to know that Thatcher was responsible. Thank God for the fearless, unbiased, reporting of the BBC ;-p Even at the time we all knew it was a mistake; on the day, when rates first went up, I remember working out my mortgage payments, and we were broke. When it went up a second time that day, I knew everybody was bust, so we opened a bottle of champagne.
If someone had told me that Margret Thatcher was a visiting Alien, I would have believed it.
John Farley Says more about you than Margaret Thatcher.
John Farley She was.
lolol
- What are we talking about 100k pounds?
- Probably about 10 million
44:03 😁 "... the Prime Minister found a couple of minutes to come and chat to ... a tabloid tosspot! ..."
Lol!!!
It was an insane idea at the outset to peg the pound but differ in monetary policy.
I think it was the first time the British recognized that Germany was Europe's leading economy. It wasn't the German's aligning with the British, it was the British aligning itself with the Germans.
Aligning with the German economy when it was trying to balance and ingest Eastern Germany after the Wall fell. Not an ordinary economy to tie to!!
Britain was the sick man of Europe by the 1970s and would fall far behind West Germany, France and even got overtaken by Italy for a short period of time. I disagree
Luvly, luvly Ludwig Van, my Droogies.
Best Documentary everrr!
2021... what have you got in store for us?
Bad really bad really really bad and then even worse
Just happen re-watch this on April 1, 2019, in the midst of the Brexit debacle.
@etcetra etcetra ..... yes, John Major casting his grey, erroneous, shadow again in 2019. He obviously doesn’t know when to keep is mouth shut.
I’m watching it in January 2021....Brexit has happened god help us.xx
@@susanlansdell863 The same people who told you that joining the ERM would be great for the British economy (it was a total disaster) and that Britain not joining the Euro would be disastrous (it wasn't at all) have now been telling you that Brexit would be catastrophic for the British economy.
Why on earth would you believe people who have been so constant and consistently wrong??
It's obviously just a scare tactic to trick you into giving up your sovereignty to a European superstate.
@@susanlansdell863Sept 2023. No it hasn't.
Do I understand correctly? The British couple the Pound with the German currency without any pre arrangements and then expect Germany to adjust its financial politics to British preference? It's not the European common currency that doesn't work, it's British hubris and arrogance!
As a British man, I have to say: you make a very good point, sir
And all whilst still paying off a huge national debt from the war!
The ERM was not gonna work so crashing out was probably a good choice
As for the common currency the question is whether it works for those still inside it
@@vinniechan well regardless, Britain insisting on getting their way and then not being granted favours to bail them out is a classic example of how the perception of being a powerful colonial power still is present in British foreign politics despite there not being any colonial power left. This is the same mechanism which lead to BREXIT as well as Black Wednesday. It will happen again and again unless British foreign policy will be controlled by someone a bit less arrogant and a bit more realistic on the international stage. Britain is just a country as every other major EU member and has to act accordingly. If it doesn't, no wonder it does not work. But it's not the EU's fault, it is Britain's fault and Britain's fault alone.
@@jnwhitaker Well Germany didn't force anybody in there. A flawed idea doesn't mean you have to join it.
The tabloid fella knocking off the PM has obviously told that story many many times... definitely practiced that impersonation
Also incredible how happy they now look about the decisions taken at that time
Because it has made them richer
A documentary on 12 March 2020
Would be great. I remember the shock I felt seeing the market tumble 10% in a single day
The documentary needs to be about the money printing that props up the stock market for the rich and is going to inevitably lead to the mother of all crashes
@@JesterEric Money isn't printed anymore mate, you know that?
It’s in effect printed digitally at the press of a button by central banks
@@nudisco300 you are wrong money is being printing to this day you don’t work in a bank
it was a wealth transfer. it was all by design to fund soros marxist expansion into the EU, which they had agreed to place blair as president.
4:53 - Clever wording by Thatcher here to hide her true thoughts. She said she wished John Major "all the luck in the world", not good luck, bad luck she wished him. Very obvious.
I wouldn’t wish someone luck who had stabbed me in the back either.
@@georginaohara5666 She reaped what she sowed.
No, more like what she didn't say.... "All the luck in the world....." What she didn't say is, "He's going to need it...."
@Matt What she did to the coal miners was unforgivable, I'll give you that.
we get it, yall hate margret thatcher, all she did was save your country lol
I will always love those Apple 3’s
How nice it is to watch this and realise it never happened again
Highly insightful documentary
The same sort of blundering by Politicians is happening over leaving the EU. They did not have a clue why they did it nor the consequences of doing it.
It's hilarious I just said the same thing a year later seeing this for the first time.
That's what happens when voters and politicians react emotionally rather than logically. Often, your emotions don't think further than 5 feet ahead, so to speak.
Great analysis and a gorgeous background sound, Beethoven's standards. Weird that it ended with the "Ode to joy"
@Jean Seb Astienback
No, not weird.
Irony.
Did anyone else notice the small bird walking across the brokers desk? Unusual, I wonder how it got in?
Norman Lamont knew exactly what he was doing in Bath. He knew that Major was going to fly his ERM policy plane on a kamikaze mission into the teeth of the coming guns that became Black Wednesday. He further knew the only way out of the ERM was to let him do it. He knew full well nothing short of a cataclysm was going to get the pound out of the ERM, and Britain's economic and financial woes were not going to end until they got out. So, he went to Bath, antagonized the Bundesbank managers, and didn't get so much as tea and biscuits from them. I think his plan was evidenced by his words to someone the next day (Thursday) when asked how his evening had been. Lamont said he slept like a baby, now that Britain was out of the ERM. Yeah, Lamont was playing a bit of a double game, giving full throated support to a policy he didn't like, while moving things in the direction he knew they had to go in order to get out, no matter the bloodletting.
John Major as chancellor? When he left school he failed the entrance exam for London Transport,his mathematics was obviously not good enough. 30 odd years later he put VAT on heating fuel,breaking an election promise.
Better than Gordon Brown... that guy had a PhD or masters thesis, in the history of the labour party or some such nonsense and then ended up with the keys to the treasury. He was about as qualified for the job as any man on the street was. i.e. not remotely.
His test scores were bad due to Family Stress he was experiencing. He was later able to become a certified banker, Wich I find rather incredible.
In a few days, it's Black Friday.... this time business will be booming rather than collapsing! 🤣😂🤣😂🤣😂🤣
I was there, 1987 wasn’t the crash the media would have you believe. All we lost was the huge run up the previous 9 months and 2 years later we were trading above the 1987 peak.
Lol this is about 1992 not 87
The incompetence shown by government makes me feel so angry and frustrated. Any market stall trader could do a better job in understanding the economy and these career politician rats are looking back and laughing about it with dumb smiles on their faces.
That's why only gold and silver can be used as money
THE GAME IS CROOKED EVEN TODAY
Property
Cue: "bitcoin fixes this"
"It was his decision, he took the credit"
That was a major mistake
“Going up and down like a whores drawers” 😂
Two years later I was a journalist who discovered the Bundesbank HQ in Frankfurt was filled with British-made asbestos.. acoustic panels and sound proofing, etc. One third of the HQ was being torn out, bit by bit, in sequence, at huge cost. Ironically the contractors were British - they had the most experience in removing it.
The Germans denied it flatly, fearing embarrassment. I produced documents from the contractor - they still denied it. We published.. they Germans weren't pleased..
This is why financial, and political, union is just an awful idea.
Very interesting. As an American, I wasn't even aware of this event at all. I guess I wasn't much into economics at the time.
Jeff Green ; It was front page headline news in the US although the name "Soros" was the prominent name used. To this day he is despised by Poms because he made fools of them.
Politicians were so traumatized but history only remembers a hall of fame financial trade
Good old Ludwig.
Good John Major impression.
The terrible impact of this recession on Europe can be seen in the video of downtown Rome...totally in ruins.
One crisis, on to the next one and the next.
What a colossal failure of British monetary policy ! The whole episode would have been avoided if the Brits had started with a more reasonable peg rate, and matched the interest rate policies of the Deutschmark.
I feel for the British politicians, many of them at the time had inherited the ERM mechanism that they didn't actually want. Now they were left trying to save their currency and their people. The Bank of England tried their best, but you can't fight the private sector sentiments!
Fair enough but don't forget it's ultimately the people who suffer as most politicians are millionaire's before they are even born due to their families wealth. Unfortunately they find it all too easy to lose everyone else's money as it doesn't affect them.
Major imposed it on Thatcher as chancellor of the Exchequer and then was vested in it as PM.
I still can't understand why the UK was allowed to enter the mechanism a an inflated rate they dictated, with relatively no opposition. How was there so little governance?
I think this is explained quite well here. The UK said what the rate was going to be and then just announced it. There’s not really anything you can do to counter that, other than put out your own statement contradicting the UK and kicking off the mother of all media storms that drags everyone down at the same time.
And 08 is still yet to come
This ERM disaster in the long term was a blessing to the UK, we didn't join the EURO, in 1999 so thank god for that, the 4 billion that the government burned to save the pound was a price worth paying, I remember the European parliament putting intense pressure on the UK to join the EURO, so glad we didn't.
Brussels is just a bunch of faceless thugs, thankfully the UK won't be part of it much longer
Thank Soros...!!!
no it's full of people democratically elected and every 4 years different country is presiding eu..
Same
it was about £20b that was lost
37:28 the guy has a cigarette in his hand !!! (holding the phone)
You know when that happens, shit has hit the fan!
British chancellor: I command you to lower your interest rates at once!
Germans: nein, nein, nein!
Purchase power parity had suggested DM 295 (315 from memory) was conservative. Lawson had been shadowing the DM for years prior to his resignation
The fact that these politicians can make financial decisions of this measure when they can't even run a bath is both amusing and baffling. In fact, it's incredible. Liz Trust literally made a similar decision when she was in charge for about 2 hours :)
No wonder traders can make a fortune off the back of these idiots.
The most "British" of insults in the conservations starting at 1:38
🤣🤣🤣
My mortgage interest rate went from 6% to 13% in 4 hours!
I miss the ninties.
Incredible how out of touch British politicians were at the time with regards to the common man!
A tradition they have maintained to this very day.
They’ve always out of touch, they only ordered funding for a new London sewer in 1858 because they could smell the sh*t filled river thames from parliament
the folly of fiat.. Soros was playing chess with politicians that had never played the game before.
Well said F.I.A.T. = Fraud In Any Transaction.
I mean the whole point of this was to eliminate the exchange rate which basically acted as an artificial commodity standard. Britain had to float the pound, making it more of a fiat currency not less. And as the documentary pointed out, the result was an improvement in the economy and low inflation. Fiat rules, fixed rate and commodity currencies absolutely suffocate policy choices.
@@camjanssenismyhero said everything I was going to say. Thank you. People so clearly don't know what they're talking about.
@TheFaceless Men - totally, life would all be so much better if we all carried round sacks of grain and seeds to settle our transactions with.
@@shanetonkin2850 all fiat currencies in world history have collapsed at some point.. so there
‘Markets could stand up to central banks’ 1992
MONEY PRINTER GOES BUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUR! 2020
Yet again history proves Maggie right.
Gonna be interesting to see post-Brexit's Black Days
"it was Thatcher's fault, but she didn't want to do it and she was kind of forced to do it", we get it BBC, you hate margret thatcher and make up lies to smear her.
history will repeat itself... goes up slowly making new highs...crash in a few months...then goes back up making newer highs... until 'the end' when planet earth ends due to human causes
It's always great to watch Thatch weeping....redolent of Alien 3, when the inhuman beast's bodily fluids scorch through solid steel.
+Matt Davies i heard that when thatcher got into hell,she closed 3 furnaces