This is where the boomerang effect begins. First, Western investments in emerging economies are worth less since the currency is devalued; therefore, a portion of investors’ assets have well and truly disappeared, causing severe stress in financial markets. But, more importantly, to halt the decline of their currency, emerging countries’ central banks are selling their dollar reserves to buy back their own currency on the markets (7), resulting in a surplus of dollars and an increase in demand for the local currency, causing it to rise automatically (8). For example, in such a period Turkey, India, Brazil and Indonesia among others, have each offloaded in the order of tens of billions of Dollars per month (9).
This means that Dollar buyers, the emerging countries, have become sellers. In other words, the only countries able to absorb excess Dollars are now refusing them. Let’s recapitulate: the Fed and the Treasury continue to flood the world with $65 billion a month, but no one wants them… Where can they dump them now? In a few oil producing countries which still sell in Dollars, but especially in the US of course. And what can this country’s lifeless economy do with them? Not a lot… certainly less than the emerging countries did (10).
[...]
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Notes :
1 Source:
Reuters (29/01/2014).
2 Sources:
Reuters (07/02/2014),
CNBC (07/02/2014).
3 Source: « Chicago is on the road to Detroit »,
Chicago Tribune (05/02/2014).
4 Measure adopted discretly together with the posted success of agricultural subsidy reforms. Source :
New York Times, 05/02/2014.
5 Source:
Washington Informer, 08/02/2014.
6 Our team considers that for once emerging countries' exchange rates are not related to moves in the Dollar, but economic reality.
7 A currency which they had to sell en masse, especially in 2013, to deal with the Dollar's de facto devaluation which caused other currencies to rise and risked slowing down exports.
8 The Dollar itself isn't falling immediately because the slight devaluation which should have taken place is, first, diluted by the amount of dollars in circulation and, second, offset by the fact that the Dollar is usually considered as a safe-haven currency against currencies which are reeling.
9 Sources:
CentralBanking.com (« Central Bank of Turkey sells $2.5bn in one day », 23/01/2014),
Vox (« Brazil’s central bank has intervened heavily, spending more than $50 billion and promising to double that by the end of the year », 25/09/2013), etc.
10 Somewhat indiscriminately, we must admit