Word: greenbacks
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...clearly jittery. In late March, U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner sent the dollar tumbling when he said he was "actually quite open" to China's proposal for a greater role for SDRs. The dollar lost 1.3% against the euro within 10 minutes of Geithner's unexpected comment. (The greenback recovered a short time later, after Geithner said he expected the dollar to remain the top global currency.) "The chance of a very abrupt fall in the dollar is quite possible," says Harvard University economist Jeffrey Frankel...
...greenback has also shown surprising resilience amid the financial meltdown, since investors continue to see it as a safe haven in bad times. Even after some recent losses, the dollar is 15% stronger against the euro than it was in mid-2008. The dollar has maintained its popularity in part because most major currencies don't look much more attractive. Investors judge the value of a currency relative to others. Though the U.S. economy may be in its worst condition in almost 30 years, the rest of the industrialized world isn't any better off. "The dollar should be much...
...what would take the greenback's place? Economists say that China's suggestion of turning to SDRs might be viable, since SDRs are already considered a core part of central-bank reserves. But global traders would have to begin denominating transactions in SDRs instead of dollars, and there is no sign of that happening anytime soon. Portes of the London Business School says using SDRs as the top international currency is "not impossible," but he adds that "the fundamental problem is that the issuer of the [international] currency also has to be the lender of last resort. The IMF does...
...deflation, the Swiss National Bank announced March 12 it would dump francs in the first such move by a major central bank for years. The move was enough to cut 3% off the currency's value against the euro; since then, the franc's fallen further still. Even the greenback, which rallied in recent months, stands at its lowest level against the euro since early January following the Fed's announcement last week that it would spend some $1.2 trillion on government and mortgage bonds, flooding the markets with dollars...
...dollar for the past two weeks. But currency experts predict it could climb to 85 over the next few months - a level that could trigger intervention by the Ministry of Finance and the Bank of Japan, which would buy dollars in currency markets to boost the greenback and undercut the yen. Some analysts say the exchange rate could soon reach 80 yen to the dollar. That would almost certainly spark another plunge in Japan's beleaguered stock markets - another concern for Japanese authorities...