Currency Update

The Federal Reserve publishes a trade weighted index of the value of the US$ (dollar) against a basket of the currencies of our major trading partners on a daily and monthly basis. As a result of the government shut-down we don’t have the very latest data for this index. The latest data we do have shows that the Broad index appreciated strongly in the 3rd Q of 2011 and since then have been more stable than at any time since 1993/1994.

However data is available for individual currencies from trading houses on a daily basis. The one we use is Oanda and Table 1 shows the change in value of 16 individual steel trading nation’s currencies over the last year, three months, and one month and seven days. Red numbers indicate that the currency is declining against the US dollar.