Wow - Have You Seen The Pound?

Have you seen the pound this morning? Oh, my giddy aunt, it's below $1.40 against the dollar.

Nogger, being the consummate professional, has spend half an hour trying to find out when it was last this low. And I had to go along way back to find the answer, all the way back to January 2001 in fact.

UK banking shares took a battering yesterday, with RBS announcing the largest ever corporate loss for a British firm of £20 billion, comfortably beating the previous record set by Vodaphone of "just" £15 billion.

Official figures for December, due out later today, are expected to show that inflation fell to below 1%, from November's annual rate of 3%, raising fears of deflation.

To add to the general feeling of doom and gloom Burberry announced this morning that it will close it's Rotherham factory, axing 290 jobs.

The pound fell to $1.3975 just after 9am GMT, a full 9 cents lower than where it started the week yesterday morning.

We are also down against the euro at 1.0780.