On what date did 'Black Wednesday' occur in 1992?

On what date did “Black Wednesday” occur in 1992? The answer is 16 September 1992.

Black Wednesday, also called the 1992 sterling crisis, occurred when the United Kingdom was forced to withdraw the pound from the European Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM). The ERM required participating currencies to remain within agreed exchange-rate limits, but intense market pressure made the pound’s lower boundary increasingly difficult to defend.

The British government attempted to support sterling by raising interest rates and buying pounds with foreign-exchange reserves. Those measures failed to restore confidence. On 16 September, the government announced that the United Kingdom would suspend its ERM membership, turning the day into one of the most dramatic episodes in modern British monetary history.

The crisis was connected to recession, doubts about the pound’s exchange-rate level, and tensions within the broader European monetary system. Italy also left the ERM around the same crisis. A frequently repeated misconception is that Black Wednesday was simply a stock-market crash; it was principally an exchange-rate and monetary-policy crisis. The episode later influenced debate over Britain’s relationship with European monetary integration.