NEW YORK, March 13 — The pound tumbled yesterday as Britain's exit from the EU took a step further into the unknown, with lawmakers overwhelmingly voting to reject Prime Minister Theresa May's Brexit deal.

Sterling suffered its sharpest losses earlier in the day, when the government's top legal advisor, Attorney General Geoffrey Cox, said May's last-minute changes with the EU had not changed the legal risk Britain would be “indefinitely and involuntarily” held in the so-called Irish border backstop.

“Sterling took a nosedive on the back of the Cox statement,” said ThinkMarkets analyst Naeem Aslam.

“It was his opinion which matters the most; now that he has made it clear that the recent deal has no weight, the door is wide open for sterling to move lower.”

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And move lower it did: The pound slid to as low as US$1.3005 from US$1.3143 just before Cox published his advice. The euro jumped to 86.55 pence from 85.75 pence.

Overnight, following news of May's hard-won EU concessions from Brussels, sterling had reached a three-week peak at US$1.3289 and to 84.76 pence to the euro — a level last seen in May 2017.

London's stock market, meanwhile, did well yesterday, as is often the case when sterling is weak. Frankfurt closed lower and Paris slightly up.

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Boeing crisis

Wall Street shrugged off the Brexit chaos — which increases the chances the world's fifth-largest economy could crash out of the European Union without a deal governing economic relations with the Continent.

US stocks swung to a split finish, with the crisis facing US aviation giant Boeing dragging down the benchmark Dow Jones Industrial Average while other indices inched higher.

Investors were comforted by the latest benign reading on US inflation, which fell in February to its slowest annual pace in more than two years — supporting the Federal Reserve's recent dovish turn on interest rates. — AFP