Inhaltsangabe:Introduction: As the foreign exchange rate market operates twenty-four hours a day and seven days a week it can be described as a global marketplace trading in continuous time. The importance of this market place on weal and woe of economies and agents cannot be overestimated. Long lasting disputes about exchange rate over- and under-evaluation between countries (as most prominently the case between China and the USA) and its implications for international trade, growth rates of economies, unemployment levels, financial money flows, and so forth illustrate this point. As reported by the Bank of International Settlement in its triennial Central Bank Survey 2007, covering 54 countries and jurisdictions, the daily average foreign exchange turnover as of April 2007 has reached a mind-staggering $3.21 trillion. This amount marks an increase of 69 percent compared to the $1.97 trillion three years earlier and highlights the still increasing importance of the exchange rate markets. The U.S. dollar is by far the most important currency as it is involved in 86 percent of all transactions amounting to some $2.7 trillion per day. This is by far bigger than the volume of U.S. international trade in goods and services which for the month April 2007 amounted to (imports + exports) $317.5 billion.1 Indeed, only 17 percent of exchange market turnover has been reported to occur with non-financial customer counterparties, while 43 percent of transactions occur between reporting dealers (i.e. the interbank market) and 40 percent occur between reporting and non-reporting financial institutions (e.g. hedge funds, mutual funds, pension funds, insurance companies). Accordingly, more than 2/3 of the turnover was traded as derivatives such as foreign exchange swaps, outright forwards, or options, while only 1/3 constituted spot rate transactions. These are important facts to consider when talking about forces of exchange rate determination. On ground of these figures one may reasonably explain why old-fashion standard models like the monetary model or purchasing power parity may only hold in the very long run and exchange rate movements may be much more subject to trades based on heterogeneous expectations incurred by investors, speculators and market makers. Particularly at the short-run exchange rates exhibit considerably greater volatility than macroeconomic time series leaving an impression of noisy and chaotic behavior. Throughout this work it [...]

This report describes developments in the international exchange rate and restrictive systems. The period covered by this report is 1985 and, for major developments, the first quarter of 1986. The report highlights that a salient feature of exchange rate developments in 1985 was the weakening of the U.S. dollar, following four consecutive years of appreciation. As a result, the currencies of most of the other major industrial countries appreciated against the U.S. dollar and in nominal effective terms.

This paper presents a methodology for calculating bilateral equilibrium exchange rates for a panel of currencies in a way that guarantees global consistency. The methodology has three parts: a theoretical model that encompasses the balance of payments and the Balassa-Samuelson approaches to real exchange rate determination; an unobserved components decomposition in a cointegration framework that identifies a time-varying equilibrium real exchange rate; and an algebraic transformation that extracts bilateral equilibrium nominal rates. The results uncover that, by the start of Stage III of the European Economic and Monetary Union (EMU), the euro was significantly undervalued against the dollar and the pound, but overvalued against the yen. The paper also shows that the four major EMU currencies locked their parities with the euro at a rate close to equilibrium.