Every time it looks as if the government might push for British entry, the pound weakens, with currency traders reckoning that a decision to go in would prompt the government actively to try to depress the pound's value ahead of entry.
Here's what he suggests: The U.S. dollar, the euro and the Japanese yen (with, perhaps, China's yuan and Britain's pound) would form a currency bloc.
A. Although the UK is part of Europe, the British pound remains separate from the Euro currency.
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For decades after the deal, Australians would continue to sing the U.K.'s national anthem and refer to their currency as the Australian pound.
That helps explain why the SNP has already promised to keep the Queen as head of state and the pound sterling as Scotland's currency.
But will the pound be tossed around in the currency markets?
The only major market open on Friday night when Moody's made the announcement was in currency, and the pound lost nearly a cent against the US dollar.
Commercial bank holdings of foreign currency dwindled, and the pound became difficult to convert.
Egypt faces the threat of a currency crisis after the Egyptian pound hit its lowest level in eight years.
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One neglected reason is the pound's resuscitation as a reserve currency.
Mr Poynter said that recent currency movements - with the pound weakening against the euro - should help the company's exports, and global demand for steel was picking up.
They have even created an alternative currency, the "Totnes Pound", which can only be spent within the town in an attempt to localize the economy and reduce reliance on imports.
This is accounted for by increasing raw material costs, currency movements (particularly the pound's fall against the euro), bottlenecks in the supply chain and construction in progressively more challenging sites.
You'll recall that George Osborne departed from that script last week, when he set out the negotiating stance of the rest of the UK on sharing the pound sterling as a post-independence currency, along with oversight and central banking by the Bank of England.
The central bank has been forced to drain currency reserves to prop up the Egyptian pound.
Senior officials from car company Nissan have met Prime Minister Tony Blair to voice their concerns about the strong pound and Britain's stance towards the European single currency.
Pressure to buy yen can be seen in the sharply higher volatility, spiking up to 9% from 6% earlier this month, according to Interactive Brokers, which notes that there is also higher volatility in the Swiss franc, another carry-trade currency that is rallying this week against the British pound, the Australian and Canadian dollars and the euro.
Even today private banks in Northern Ireland and Scotland issue pound notes redeemable into pounds sterling, and in Hong Kong paper currency is supplied exclusively by private banks.
Using the currency's 2007 peaks as a guide, the pound has fallen more sharply against the dollar and euro (around 25-30%) than it did after the exit from the Exchange Rate Mechanism in 1992.
Crispin Odey, the hedge fund manager who was enviably bearish about financial stocks before last year's market turmoil all but destroyed their market capitalizations, also believes the pound is going to fall, and has short positions on the currency.
Without necessary currency reserves to fund imports, it is likely that the pound will fall in value sharply.
It was the night the pound was forced out of the ERM by its plunging value in the currency markets.
Interest rates in continental Europe will stay far below British levels for a long while yet, and investors still seem to see the pound as a safe haven from the uncertainties of Europe's single currency.
The Lonely Planet suffered from the prolonged global recession and the Australian dollar appreciating to 58% against the UK pound - 80% of Lonely Planet's revenues are generated from foreign currency.
"When you are creating a currency whose purpose is to be unregulated and then that currency gains value and its exchange rate with the dollar or the pound sterling increases, then clearly this is going attract all sorts of people who want to launder their illicitly earned money, " he says.
Nationalists say that, regardless of comments now, it would be very much in the interests of rUK (rest of the UK) to maintain a stable currency zone, including Scotland - not least because Scotland could use the pound unilaterally, without reference to London.
Poles working in London were unlucky in the currency game after the Polish zloty gained about 8.5% against the British pound between March and April 2009.
The longer the pound stays high, therefore, the greater the chance that, if Britain joins the single currency, it will have to do so at a rate that a few years ago would have been thought impossibly high.
The pound fell to a 13-month low earlier against the euro but later recovered on weakness in the single currency to stand recently in New York at 89.27 pence.
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