The Australian dollar has gone up! The only clear effect of that is that headline writers are in desperate need of a simple story to tell.
I wrote currencies for two years and there is always someone telling you that if only the dollar would fall below Parity / US90c / US80c / US70c, Australian industry will suddenly be in a bed of roses.
Of course the young reporter will include such a statement in a story, because – finally – they have something to say about the currency that could garner a few clicks.
But of course the reporter knows it is not true. There is no magic level for the dollar.
Every little fall in our dollar increases the benefit of exporting. A certain firm may have a break-even level, but an industry will find its exporting grows easier gradually, not step-like, as the dollar falls.
The effect on “industry” is in fact, even more complex than this. Firms don’t just sell. They have to pay employees and import material and equipment. That’s easier with a high dollar.
The simple story is high dollar = bad. But with a really high dollar in the last few years, the Australian economy grew fast, and Australians enjoyed a high quality of life. We bought overseas holidays, flat-screen TVs, overseas apparel, smartphones and Apple Mac computers at an incredible rate.
With a low dollar, such consumption is harder. But businesses should be better off. There will be less competition from imports, and it should be easier to export. But of course the equipment and materials they need to import as an input will rise in price.
It’s almost as if every time the dollar moves, someone benefits and someone loses! The whole thing brings to mind, for me, Kurt Vonnegut’s famous graphing of stories.
The industry wants you to believe that a rising dollar is a bad to worse story. The journalist writing the story is not going to fall for this – they want a better story arc than that.
They position it somewhere along the arc of the first two graphs: Industry had it good for ages, now it is bad. Or, for ages industry had it bad, now it is looking good. But such arcs are only ever true for a sub-section of the economy. Overall, we seem to be able to thrive whether the dollar is low or high.
Here’s the truth: Any move in the dollar is an ambiguous and mysterious development. It takes with one hand and gives with the other. If you’re worse off at work, you may be better off at home. If you lose your job making exports, you may get a job delivering imports, etc.
The ineffable nebulousness of any story about the currency is of course a headache to headline writers. $A Crash Causes Yet More Ambiguity is a headline for a post-modern prose poem, not a news story. It will not fly. It will not get clicks. Do not even try to talk to the subeditor about the way really, uncertainty is the marrow of life
Vonnegut, of course, turns nebulousness into celebrated works of literature. But currency writers are no Vonnegut.
You can expect the inherent uncertainty that should be the backbone of currency stories to remained concealed.
Thomas the Think Engine 