This article was co-authored with Dominique Dwor-Frecaut (bio below). This article can also be found on the Macro Hive platform here. Macro Hive is a leading producer of macro and financial market research and strategy. The virus has catalysed more, perhaps, than it has caused. Established trends in geopolitics, economics, financial markets, public policy, and social …read more
From 2008 to COVID-19, currency market volatility trended down. Volatility was elevated in 2015-2017 after its 2014 record low (measured by CVIX), but this fit within the trend, as December 2019 levels tested the previous record. This trend can be attributed to: convergence in the drivers of currency value like growth and inflation aligned monetary …read more
The US dollar is at an inflection point. Can the dollar’s cycle continue in the face of convergent economic fundamentals and central bank coordination?
The currency war “truce” at the G20 meeting in February of this year has effectively placed political pressure on Japan to refrain from further depreciation of the yen. We investigate whether this has frozen USDJPY at its “fair value”. Although a naïve reading of PPP figures suggests that the outcome is reasonable, adjustment for productivity differentials suggests that the yen is now heavily overvalued versus the dollar, with attendant negative consequences for the Japanese economy.
• The US has had a long standing concern about what it perceives to be excessive “currency manipulation” on the part of some countries, especially in Asia. This concern is primarily driven by the large and persistent US current account deficit, which will necessitate significant relative currency adjustments for it to at least begin to unwind.
• A problem with this view emanating from US officialdom is that the pass-through effects between currency movements and domestic inflation in the US has been shown to be weak, thus making the process of adjustment more drawn out at best, and ineffective at worst.
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