The Rise of the Dollar Ends with a Crisis

28 Sep 2022

Historical rallies regarding the US dollar show an unpreceded rise for high-risk assets, including stocks, which in the past had led to some sort of financial/economic crisis. For sure, always is very difficult to make an accurate forecast in price and in time, but we must not forget the explosion of the tech bubble in the 2000s, the ‘’Great Recession’’ in 2008, as well as the sovereign debt in 2012 since the one factor that has a high correlation to those declines, was the strengthening of U.S Dollar at least by 19% each time. Just to remind you that the benchmark S&P500 has already fallen by 23% this year.

An estimation from Morgan Stanley is that the profit margin of US companies will be dropped 0.5% for every 1% of the rising Dollar. And if we consider that during the fourth quarter due to the rise of the Dollar earnings will fall by about 10%, we can imagine the disaster that will follow in stocks, excluding other issues of energy costs. Moreover, the occurrence of major central banks’ policy tightening now in an aggressive manner is amazing. Therefore, this new bubble has to break out suddenly.

The possibilities are raising for more rate hikes, according to the recent stubbornly high inflation, which in turn will strengthen the Dollar even more. And this is good for the US because strengthening the dollar means cheaper imports and a record purchasing power for Americans. But for non-American citizens is bad and especially for the other Central Banks that have deposits in US dollars. It will be more expensive to repay their loans – companies and emerging market governments – since, from the debt data perspective, $83 billion dollars are going to be matured by the next year covering 32 countries. According to the World Bank, there are warnings of heading a global recession and many developing economies will face huge damages respecting the cutting in spending on education and health care to cover their debt payments.

What’s even more concerning for now is that volatility and VIX is still relatively low despite lower stocks. So is extreme fear yet to come? Check our VIX chart in one of our past ideas.