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.
Here's one of the "minister gets informed about the situation by his driver" scenes from "Yes, Minister": ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-0nqAXszK78U.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
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.
I know a family who lost their house ....due to job being lost because of this bloody stupidity ......I'm the son of that family we ended in a dam caravan for 5 yrs ........we are watching this all again with this tory goverment
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.
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
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
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.
+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.
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.
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...
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.
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
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.
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.
@@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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Very clever example of tory incompetence here. Spend 10 years deregulating all of finance, removing government control and involvement... then being shocked that the market does things they don't want and that they can't stop.
Not Tory incompetence. Your misunderstanding. Government shouldn't control markets at all. It stops markets functioning. Government can not like what markets do, but they should stay ot of them. Their constant interference makes things considerably worse. As we're now seeing.
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..
