Doug Stanglin

USATODAY

In the blink of an eye, as the Brexit shock sank in, British stocks and the pound took a heavy hammering, with the currency alone falling from its highest point against the dollar this year to the steepest drop in more than three decades.

In the first ten minutes of trading on Friday, London's FTSE index shed $164 billion of its value.

London's banking stocks, slammed by Brexit's impact on exports to Europe and the fall of the pound, lost more than $60 billion in value.

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The pound, which trades around-the-clock, fell 12% against the dollar, from $1.50 to below $1.35 in six hours.

The human impact of the pound's demise was visible outside the London branches of Thomas Cook travel, where long lines of anxious vacationers formed to buy foreign currency ahead of vacations.

As demand mounted, Thomas Cook suspended its online exchange in order to have enough sterling to serve the flood of customers at its outlets. Even then, the travel group put a 1,000-pound per person limit on the amount it would exchange for foreign currency.

Despite the immediate plunge, however, the British currency — ironically — seemed poised to recover much of its losses against its EU counterpart in the next few days, Jeremy Leach, chief executive officer at the asset managers Managing Partners Group, tells The Telegraph.

"In the longer term, sterling will strengthen against the Euro because the UK’s economy is in much better shape than many of its European peers,” Leach says.





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