Mensajepor virrey » Lun Oct 31, 2011 9:29 pm
For the better part of the past decade, the American dollar has been the 98-pound weakling of the foreign exchange world. It has lost value against almost every other global currency — not just the euro, pound and yen but even the Romanian new leu and the Latvian lats.
Driven largely by the Federal Reserve’s policy of printing dollars to help spur a healthy economic recovery that remains stubbornly elusive, the dollar, weighed against a basket of other currencies, hit a 40-year low in May 2011.
But betting against the dollar may no longer be such a safe play — not necessarily because of any sudden macroeconomic shifts but because of a sense that the long dollar sell-off may have finally gone too far.
The dollar’s bounce, though too brief to be called a trend, has not been driven by any noticeable improvement in America’s economic fundamentals. Indeed, the faint but real risk that Congress will fail to reach agreement on raising the legal ceiling on government borrowing only underscores the still parlous state of the American economy.
At the same time, unemployment in the United States remains stubbornly high, at 9 percent. And there is a strong belief among big money investors that the Obama administration as well as the Federal Reserve chairman, Ben S. Bernanke, tacitly welcome a cheaper dollar to spur exports and encourage American manufacturers to hire more aggressively.
But analysts also see another, more technical reason behind the dollar’s long decline — one that may well be ending. Ever since the global financial crisis began to ease in 2009, the appeal of investing in higher-yielding currencies and commodities all over the world has created what, in trader parlance, is called a risk-on, risk-off dynamic.
Investors tend to sell their safer holdings, like United States Treasury bonds, when they feel more bullish. Because 90 percent of the world’s hedge funds are dollar-based, those changes in sentiment can have a depressing effect on the American currency. Reserve-rich central banks in emerging markets have also been selling dollars and buying euros to rebalance their reserve portfolios.
