Monday, November 3, 2008

Currency crash! : Impending danger


Pakistan, Russia, Singapore, Brazil, India...Hmm finally we all see it coming. The chameleon of financial crisis appears to be changing its color from 'liquidity crunch' to 'currency crash'. In the wake of forex leaving countries, all currencies are seeing new grounds day by day. Already troubled US is donating dollars to save them. This all portends to an impending danger of 'currency crisis'. The contagion of credit crunch has already spread across the glob and has infected the currencies too. Such infection is not limited to East Asia (East Asian currency crisis of 90s) this time, it has spread its wings to Europe and Latin America too. In October 2008, other currencies have devalued against dollar from 15%-40%. IMF has to bailout Iceland, Hungary and Ukraine. Currently Pakistan is in the queue of the beggars. We may state that these are small names anyway, why to worry for them. But the real worry is that big guns such as South Korea, South Africa, Australia, Singapore, Mexico and Russia are new beggars in making. How long 'currency swaps' by IMF will save the non-dollar rich countries.
Economists have been praying to governments to find out real reasons (or other reasons at least) for the current crisis, however, government happily ignored and restricted their movements only to save the world from liquidity crunch. But now the contagion has spread to currency market quite substantially. Earlier we believed that dollar out flow from the market is just because every body else is doing the same, but now the reason is total external debt on each country. More debt leads to further devaluation of the currency. Indian Rupee has depreciated by 20% against Dollar, debt on India is not small and Foreign Institutional Investors are not likely to come back to Indian markets in near future. No wonder people are speculating Indian Rupee to go up to Rs 55 a Dollar.
The biggest mistake the world has committed is to underestimate the crisis. It must not be underestimated further.

1 comment:

Shardi said...

Rightly said - Do not underestimate this crisis.. It is synonymous to the storm in movie "Perfect Storm". Moreover the current crisis is a slap on the face of whoever mentioned "decoupling of economies". To me it seems all economies are more entangled than before.