Re: my early bird antics cost them over 40k
If I remember the day, and the following couple of days correctly, the problem was originally attributed to the currency dealers.
We had joined the ERM, and one of the requirements was to keep your currency within a set of bounds against the other ERM currencies, defined at the date of entry. When the pound started to wobble a bit, the currency market started trading in the pound, as there was money to be lost and made, but this forced the price of the pound down against other currencies.
The chancellor tried to stabilize the pound by buying them back from the market using foreign currency reserves, but could not keep up with the amount of sterling available that was driving the price down.
In a desperate attempt to keep the pound up, the base lending rate was jumped to double digits, which scared the shit out of almost everyone who had a mortgage (fixed rate mortgages were not that much of a thing back then), but finally the government admitted defeat, allowed sterling to be removed from the ERM, and brought the base rate back to something more reasonable.
All of this happened over 2-3 days, and at the end of it, the pound had found a stable, if lower, position again, and almost everybody who borrowed money heaved a huge sigh of relief while licking their wounds.
If the base rate had remained at it's peak, my mortgage, which was pretty much at the limit of what I could afford at the time, would have nearly doubled. It was a huge embarrassment to the UK government, and probably laid the grounds for us staying out of the Euro, as later Gordon Brown was worried that the same thing would happen before any entry to the Euro.