Breaking: British PM Johnson to announce new national lockdown for England, starting midnight - BBC

FXStreet Team FXStreet

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson to announce new national lockdown for England, starting at midnight, according to the BBC.

There will be a live announcement coming up.

So far, there has been no reaction in the market but the expectations are for further pressures on sterling.

The fact was well telegraphed in recent media which weighed on the pound significantly already considering the state of affairs in the Kingdom after the UK racked up another record high of cases.

GBP/USD has already been pressured from a high of 1.3703 to a low of 1.3541 at the start of the week.

PM to make a televised statement on the 'next steps'

Amid a growing clamour for action from Labour and Tory MPs, the PM is set to make a televised statement on the 'next steps' in the crisis at 8pm, with Parliament being recalled on Wednesday.

A No10 spokesman said: 'The spread of the new variant of COVID-19 has led to rapidly escalating case numbers across the country.

'The Prime Minister is clear that further steps must now be taken to arrest this rise and to protect the NHS and save lives. He will set those out this evening.'

The latest grim daily tally was released earlier with 58,784 new cases which is a 42 per cent rise on just a week ago.

UK over 50,000 infections every day for a week

The Kingdown has passed the milestone of 50,000 infections every day for a week.

The easing of restrictions at Christmas was expected to fuel the outbreak considering the new variant's speed of transmission.

The Department of Health chiefs also posted 407 more deaths, up just 14 per cent on the figure recorded last week.

Market implications

The worst in this data is perhaps not even appeared yet,

It can take infected patients several weeks to fall severely ill and succumb to the illness.

Therefore, we are likely to see fatalities reach their peak and continue to rise at a later stage and the nation is already printing death tolls not seen since the darkest days of the spring.

Considering the Brexit left-overs in uncertainty, there could be darker days ahead of the pound. A break of the 10-day moving average could be the bulls last dance for a while:

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FXStreet Team

FXStreet

Composed of a group of economic journalists and FX experts, the FXStreet content team produces and oversees all content published on FXStreet. It provides a purely journalistic approach to the Forex market.

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