No. of Recommendations: 10
I've been trying to understand the consternation about the US dollar. Looking at the long-term chart (60+ years of DXY), it looks pretty stable. Seems like it averages about 100, the vast majority of time it trades +/-10% from 100, it periodically trades +/-20% from 100, and VERY rarely (once in 60 years) trades +/-30% from 100. In fact it appears remarkably stable considering the passage of history.
Those are actually pretty big moves. e..g, 120 to 72 2002-2008 means that a $100 bill in a drawer lost 40% of its general purpose purchasing power relative to the other currencies in the world, all of which presumably also had some inflation. For example, the standard deviation of the Canadian dollar versus the euro is about half the variation of USD/EUR or USD/CAD.
This doesn't say anything at all about whether the US dollar will rise or fall next. It's just an observation that the US dollar is one of the world's major currencies that sometimes wanders around more than others, so it's kind of funny when people forget there is a dollar illusion. It's common to see a headline like "gold soaring!" when all that happened was the US dollar fell that week, or "Sterling sliding!" when all that happened was the US dollar rose. The worst is the "financial journalism" trope that the price of oil tends to rise when the dollar falls. Well, yes, in the same sense that the length of something measured in inches is smaller than the number representing its length in centimetres.
These aren't just theoretical effects. I switched my [huge] mortgage to be in dollars while it was high, and switched it back to euros when the dollar was low, reducing the balance owed by half with two trades. (not that I'm so perfect...I did a whole bunch more similar changes in the subsequent few years that amounted to very little net gain)
Jim
