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Euro falls below parity with the dollar

reuters.com

31–40 of 286 posts

Re: Euro falls below parity with the dollar

#31
I assume this should be good for EU economy on the long run?

Like exports from EU to US are now more profitable.

Or am I missing something? Can someone with more understanding/background explain how this might effect production and exports?

Re: Euro falls below parity with the dollar

#32
post #21

Just for fun, I took a look at GBP/USD and it looks like that is tanking as well. Meanwhile the ruble is stronger than it's been in 4 years. For people in the EU/UK, how has this currency slide impacted your day to day?

The ruble isn't strong. You can't sell meaningfully sell it on the open market. When you buy it, the price goes up. When you can't sell it, the price stays up.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/russia-ukraine-ruble-currency-r...

Re: Euro falls below parity with the dollar

#33
Every article about the EUR/USD ratio talks about gas prices.

But the current rise of the Dollar started 15 years ago.

Over these 15 years, it has become more and more apparent, that software is eating the world. And the US keeps extending their lead in this area.

I would not be surprised if that contributes to a long term trend in the EUR/USD ratio.

(I'm sitting in a cafe in Germany, writing this text on laptop made by a US company, running an operating system maintained in the USA, into a browser made in the USA and posting it to a website of a US company.)

Re: Euro falls below parity with the dollar

#34
post #21

Just for fun, I took a look at GBP/USD and it looks like that is tanking as well. Meanwhile the ruble is stronger than it's been in 4 years. For people in the EU/UK, how has this currency slide impacted your day to day?

Two responses saying "oil and gas are more expensive, but that is other causes"... forgetting that oil and gas are priced in dollars. So the exchange rate is certainly a cause (i.e. 20-30% of recent moves), though agree not the main cause (recent moves are > 100%, mostly due to Russia tightening the pipe).

Re: Euro falls below parity with the dollar

#35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Parity can just mean equal. And the Euro’s creators clearly targeted a value similar to the dollar.

Well, this led me to learn something from my stupid comment. Originally the EUA ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Unit_of_Account - euro's grandparent) started at 1:1 with USD. (and quickly diverged) TIL EUA was exchanged 1:1 for ECU, then 1:1 for EUR, so that's a nice continuation.

> Originally the EUA (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Unit_of_Account - euro's grandparent) started at 1:1 with USD.

> EUA was exchanged 1:1 for ECU, then 1:1 for EUR, so that's a nice continuation.

Interesting, I didn't know that. We did something similar here in Brazil to get rid of the hyperinflation: the Real (which started at 1:1 with the USD) was preceded by the URV, an accounting measure which was used to denominate all prices; during that time, the prices continued to inflate in the former currency, but were mostly fixed in URV, so when the currency changed from Cruzeiro Real to Real (at 1:1 with the URV), the prices stopped inflating so much. Of course, that was not the only thing the Plano Real did to get rid of the hyperinflation, but it got rid of an important "inertial" component of the inflation, in which prices inflated daily because they had always inflated daily.

Re: Euro falls below parity with the dollar

#36
post #21

Just for fun, I took a look at GBP/USD and it looks like that is tanking as well. Meanwhile the ruble is stronger than it's been in 4 years. For people in the EU/UK, how has this currency slide impacted your day to day?

The ruble is so strong because russia cannot spend money anymore because of sanctions.

I'm living in Germany, the biggest problem is the inflation caused by energy prices. It's still lower than in the US or the UK, but people are starting to struggle. Business is going well as Germany is mostly export-driven, but companies don't want to give out rises.

Re: Euro falls below parity with the dollar

#37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interestingly the Google exchange rate chart has historical rates for EUR/USD going back to 1982. Wonder where those numbers are coming from...

ECU[1] I'd guess [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Currency_Unit

And it turns out that the reason a Euro is roughly a dollar is because it's the successor to the ECU, which was the successor to something called the European Unit of Account, which was originally defined to be a dollar's worth of gold. (I figured this out when I went down a Wikipedia rabbit hole last month: https://gottwurfelt.com/2022/07/16/why-is-a-euro-close-to-a-...

Re: Euro falls below parity with the dollar

#38
post #2

The title of this makes me annoyed. What parity? They're both abstract made up units that happened to be even on a random scale for a while. This is financial numerology :-( (yes, I know there's more content and "this week's currency summary" sounds less fun and I should chill out)

Like your salary?

Re: Euro falls below parity with the dollar

#39
> German economy, among the most exposed to disruptions in Russian gas supply, is "likely" to suffer a recession over the winter if the energy crisis continues to deepen

At this point I feel the EU is pretty much done and the war just showed how weak the EU leadership is along how individual member nations acting sometimes totally against each other (see France doubling down on nuclear while Germany does the opposite). Like I don't see any positive outcome for the Union no matter what happens in the war, unless you see the US having an even greater influence over Europe as a positive thing. Personally I'm extremely pessimistic.

Re: Euro falls below parity with the dollar

#40

Another interesting thing is that many countries are experiencing lower inflation than the US, but their currency is getting weaker, so the USD's purchasing power is increasing two-fold. I've been planning a trip to Malaysia because while their exchange rate against the dollar has fallen, they've only experienced ~3% inflation, so not only are all of their products 22% as expensive, they also haven't meaningfully cha…

> been planning a trip to Malaysia because while their exchange rate against the dollar has fallen, they've only experienced ~3% inflation, so not only are all of their products 22% as expensive, they also haven't meaningfully changed in price since 3 years ago

You’re running a real-goods arbitrage analysis. It’s dicey to compare national inflation statistics for this purpose. They’re measuring separate baskets of goods on different methodologies.

This means you must reconstruct the baskets. As such, you might as well measure the things you’re buying. For traded goods, e.g. grain and fuel, there is unlikely a massive pre-tax spread because professionals are looking at the same data. For non-tradable goods, e.g. hotels and restaurant meals, you might see a yawning gap.

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