Thursday, June 13, 2013

Indian Rupee at all time low. Is it due to USD strengthening ??

If you are following the news, you must have seen it. If you are some of those Indians, who are out of India and doesn't have to worry about happenings in India then you are a luck person.

The news is 1xUSD = 58.98 INR. 

For majority of the Indians, the impact is bad. Even for those folks who are working outside and sending money with a grin need to be worried. Just think about it. The same 1xUSD used to buy a full breakfast in 2005 @ 35 rupees. Right now you are lucky if you can get a good coffee @ 58 Rupees. So numbers may look high in absolute value but the buying power has gone deep down.

So I am hearing this time, the problem is not with Indian rupee weakening but USD strengthening (???). I have no idea on what is doing what and I do believe many of these analysts speak  hind sight.

So what I tried is to match this with another currency. Not Euro or AUD which has seen some downs and ups due to various factors. I thought I'd compare with SGD as SGD is pegged with a basket of currencies and the variations with other currencies are not that great.

Below are the 10 year charts with Indian Rupee (INR), Malaysian Ringgit (MYR), Philippines Peso (PHP), Russian Rouble (RUB), Chinese Yuan (CNY), Indonesian Rupaiah (IDR) Sri Lankan Rupee (LKR) & Brazilian (BRL).

So if I see the variance over 10 years, we are the 3rd worst performing currency compared to SGD. The bottom two are war ridden Sri Lanka & forever corrupt Indonesia. Most of the currencies like Peso, Ringgit, did better..

MYR 23%
PHP 29%
CNY 39%
BRL 64%
RUB 66%
INR 82%
IDR 83%
LKR 102%



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