Which British event in 1992 forced the pound out of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism?

Black Wednesday was the British event in 1992 that forced the pound out of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism.

On September 16, 1992, the United Kingdom struggled to keep sterling within the ERM’s permitted band. The government raised interest rates and spent billions of pounds buying sterling, but market pressure continued. Britain eventually suspended the pound’s ERM membership.

The episode damaged the credibility of the government’s economic policy and produced large losses for the Treasury. Currency speculators, most famously George Soros’s Quantum Fund, made substantial profits by betting that the pound could not remain at its official rate.

Black Wednesday was a currency crisis rather than a conventional stock-market crash. It is sometimes confused with Black Monday, the name used for major stock-market falls in 1929 and 1987. The ERM was intended to limit exchange-rate fluctuations among participating European currencies.