Record UK Pound Oil Price
On the back of a 2% rise in the price of oil and 0.44% fall in the value of the UK pound against the US dollar today I believe we have a new record price for oil when the US dollar price of West Texas Intermediate is expressed in UK pounds (hat tip ianbeale). Is this significant? I’m not sure - but I am surprised by the total lack of coverage of the high oil prices on television media today.
Today’s $65.72 and 1.73515 dollars to the pound results in a value of £37.88 a barrel. With a stronger pound during the spike after Katrina the price only just crept above £37 and compared to May 2005 the ~$50 oil and exchange rate of over 1.9 resulted in a UK pound price of approximately £26.30. In less than a year prices when looked at like this have increased some 44%. Luckily the UK doesn’t have to buy much US dollar denominated oil with UK pounds.
Graphs show dollar denominated oil prices and the dollar-pound exchange rate over the last year.
Click graphs to enlarge (source: BBC Market Data)
This post was written by Chris Vernon
This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 29th, 2006 at 10:27 pm and is filed under Economy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.