The commodity currencies of the world continues to take a beating on the back of the sharp drop in oil prices. This is now causing some to fear “currency instability”. Just these this story from Canada’s Financial Post:

The Canadian dollar is falling too far and too fast, damaging public and business confidence in Canada, say economists.

National Bank Financial Markets warned in a new report Monday that the loonie is now out of line with fundamentals and the Bank of Canada cannot risk driving it even lower with a rate cut.

“Currency instability has become a concern, and we think the Bank of Canada must take note,” said Stéfane Marion, chief economist at National Bank. “For Canadian businesses, currency depreciation has already sent the price of machinery and equipment (73% of which is imported) to a new record high. This is bound to complicate Canada’s transition to a less energy-intensive economy.”

Marion said that by his team’s calculations, the loonie should have shed about 10 cents against the U.S. dollar in the past few months. But it has fallen by 25 cents.

…“Rarely has it tumbled so far so fast, and against so many currencies,” Marion said. “The steepness of the CAD’s depreciation against the USD is without precedent — 33%, or 3.5 standard deviations, in 24 months.”He warned that in order to help create some stability for the loonie, the Bank of Canada should not cut interest rates at its Wednesday meeting. Doing so would risk sending the currency as low as 66 cents this week.

“In our view, the Bank of Canada would be better to keep its powder dry this month and act, if need be, after the next federal budget when it will be better able to assess fiscal support to the economy,” Marion said.

Economists aren’t the only ones warning about the damage of a lower loonie. Jayson Myers, chief executive of Canadian Manufacturers & Exporters, told Bloomberg Monday that exchange rate volatility has hurt business confidence and put a chill on spending decisions.

“My advice right now would be to even take a look at increasing interest rates by a quarter of a point,” he told Bloomberg. “Interest rates are low already. A little bit of dollar stability would be better.”

Sorry guys, but this is all nonsense. There are absolutely no sign of “currency instability” (whatever that is) and there are no signs at all that the drop in the Canadian dollar is causing any financial distress.

In fact if we look at the development in the Canadian dollar in recent weeks it has developed completely as we would have been expected given the drop in oil prices and given the developments in global currency markets in general.

I have earlier argued that we could think of the Canadian free floating currency regime basically as a regime that shadows an Export Price Norm. Hence, the Loonie is developing as if it is pegged to a basket of oil prices (15%), the US dollar 65% and Asian currencies (yen and won, 20%).

The graph below shows the actual development in USD/CAD and a “predicted” USD/CAD had Bank of Canada pegged the Loonie to 65-20-15 basket.

The graph is pretty clear – there is nothing unusual about the development in the Loonie. Yes, the Loonie has weakened significantly, but this can fully be explained by the drop in oil prices and by the weakening of the Asian currencies (in the basket primarily the drop in the won) and of course by the general continued strengthening of the US dollar.

If anything this is a sign that the Bank of Canada remains credible and that the markets are confident that the BoC will be able to ease monetary conditions further to offset any demand shock to the Canadian economy due to lower export prices (oil prices).

Therefore, it is also obvious that the BoC should not undertake any action to curb the weakening of the Loonie. In fact if the BoC tried to curb the Loonie sell-off then the result would be a dramatic tightening of monetary conditions, which would surely push the Canadian economy into recession and likely also create public finance troubles and increase the risk of a financial crisis. Luckily the Bank of Canada for now seems to full well-understand that there is absolutely no point of intervening in the FX market to curb the Loonie sell-off. Well-done!

HT Dr. Brien.