This piece was written before Christmas and will appear in the first 2010 edition of the Forex Journal. The data covers the market up until mid December.
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Old Maid is a card game where the simple task is to avoid holding a given card (often the queen of spades) at the end. Even in the company of good friends however, holding Old Maid at the end is not fun. Often, you have to buy the drinks, drop a piece of clothes, or endure other travails. And as it turns out, the global FX market is not unlike this good old game of cards where the Old Maid is proxied by having a strong currency on whose shoulders the correction of global macroeconomic imbalances must invariably fall. In this way, and although one sometimes get the feeling that everyone believes that everybody may actually export their way out of their current misery, buying one country’s currency means selling another and thus, someone (be it an individual economy or a group/basket of economies) must end up holding Old Maid.
The discussion on global imbalances has many faces, but in the context of currency fluctuations and FX markets the focus tends, one way or the other, to gravitate towards the need for the US dollar to fall. This was evident before the crisis and still is. However, if this seems obvious to the most ardent dollar bears as well as to those who still see a structurally important role for the buck going forward, it has been far less evident who should pick up the slack if the dollar is to correct to the new global fundamentals. In this way, key emerging economies are still pegging their currency to the green back and in general; while most claim to see the benefit of a strong currency they just don’t want it to be their currency.