Hi Everyone,
Although the term March Madness was coined to refer to the intense basketball season this month, I feel it perfectly describes my hectic schedule this month.
For the first week of March, I worked on Princeton High School's PowerSchool Android App during all of my free time, and (finally) published it to the Google Play Store (link)
Princeton High School had its Spring Break over the past two weeks and I was fortunate enough to spend that time with my family vacationing in London and Paris. During those two weeks, I decided to unwind completely so that I could relax more and absorb the European culture. I didn't bring my laptop and only went on my phone/the Internet once every other night to read the news. London and Paris are both amazing cities and I hope I can study abroad or live in one of them during college.
Now that I'm back, I thought I would get back to posting short posts.
The British Pound is still going strong against the USD and the Euro is recovering. Britain's economy is forecasted to pass both France's and Germany's economy by 2030. Britain's service sector, comprising over 75% of its GDP, and its tourism industry, with London ranking as the 3rd most visited city in the world, are both expected to grow within the upcoming years.
The British Government's economic austerity plan, which aims to cut government debt by reducing government spending, is finally working. An austere economic plan is one that reduces the number of services and goods provided by the government in the hope that private corporations will expand to cover that reduced number of goods and services. Having consistently been one of the slowest growing economies in Europe over the past post-depression years, England's economy is finally growing by roughly 2.5%, and is expected to continue growing in that range for the next few years. It's not only the British government's austere economic plan that is contributing to Britain's growth; it's also Britain's quantitive easing program. Although an austere plan involves reducing government spending, the Bank of England has decided it is best to spend (the saved money?) on a Euro 375 billion bond-buy-back aggressive quantitive easing program to keep interest rates low. The Bank of England's Quantitive Easing Program is similar to the US's Federal Reserve QE Program in that they both involve the country's central bank purchasing large amounts of bonds monthly to keep interest rates low and make bond purchases unattractive to investors, who should then (hopefully) invest in stocks and companies. Unlike the US's Federal Reserve, the Bank of England stated that they will continue the aggressive QE program to keep interest rates near 0.5% well into 2015, while the Federal Reserve has already begun decreasing the amount of bonds it is buying back. Both the Bank of England and the Federal Reserve's QE Programs are working; both economies are growing positively in the 2% range, consumer confidence is increasing, manufacturing & construction sectors are growing, and unemployment is decreasing.
Although I haven't gotten into FX/Currency Trading yet, I would go long on the British pound. I would also invest in companies trading on the London Stock Exchange. Britain's economy started off the recovery process slow, but I can only imagine that it will begin to pick up, especially as the Bank of England announced they would continue purchasing hundreds of billions in bonds to reduce the interest rate. In terms of historical precedence, most recently/currently with the US, quantitive easing programs that aim to reduce interest rates in order to increase investments in companies through the stock exchange, has only helped that country's economy to grow and their stock market indices to rise.
