So who else is changing every cent they have to Sterling next week?

The British were proved correct in not joining the euro anyway.

Pity we joined ; it lead to our banks borrowing massively from Europe + our building boom etc.

If we had stayed with Sterling as we were for centuries we would not be in as bad a mess. We would have had more control over our interest rates. They were clearly too low for us 5, 6, 8 years ago but we were only 1% of the population of the eurozone so the germans told us to **** off, they were fixing the interest rates to suit themselves.

gigino wrote: »

And with a population maybe 7% that of the UK, we would have a bigger say than we had in the eurozone,

Well between 1922 and 1979 when Ireland was in a currency union with sterling they had ZERO say in setting bank of England base rates.

And for most of following two decades Ireland was in the EMS/ERM which meant it had little real control of its interest rates then either (there might have been a percentage point wiggle room if even that) You may remember the currency crisis of the early 1990's.

The notion of a small economy heavily dependent on overseas trade and investment having any seriously meaningful control of its interest rates (along with many other aspects of its fiscal policies) is something of a myth. The best they can do is try and pick a larger economy to hitch its currency to and hope for the best.

During the late 1980's Ireland moved from tracking £STG to tracking the DM (and subsequently the €) while one can certainly argue that that decision was a mistake it is disingenuous to peddle the myth of Ireland ever achieving fiscal independence. Even the British economy is heavily linked to New York, Frankfurt, Tokyo and increasingly Beijing