The “Strong Dollar” factor:

“Strong Dollar” is said to be one of the main causes explaining the poor economic performance of the United States during the first quarter of 2015. United States’ exports were affected by the appreciation of the currency vis-à-vis some of the foreign currencies. Likewise, exports towards the United States benefited from the U.S. Dollar appreciation. In aggregated terms, currencies of major U.S. trade partners, versus the U.S. dollar, have gone up in average by roughly 3.2% in the last five months of 2015. This trend can be seen in the picture below on blue line (1 Broad). Furthermore, a subset of other major currencies that circulate worldwide have appreciated since January by an average of 5.7% against the U.S. dollar, which can be observed in the orange line in the graph below (2 Major Currencies). The euro, instead, has depreciated 8.3% since the beginning of the year (Yellow line in the graph below). There is where the competitive advantage resides for Europe nowadays.

Who’s to blame?

When it comes to blame foreign trade for poor economic performance in US, Asian countries come to mind of Americans. For economic growth on 2015Q1, such a statement seems to be somewhat ambiguous. The graph below shows how major Asian currencies have performed recently. The Yuan, dotted white line in the graph, has been mostly steady for what has bygone of 2015. Otherwise, the currency that has depreciated the most, amongst Asians monetary markets, is the Taiwanese Dollar. The Indian Rupee initiated the year with a downward trending which lasted until the second week of April; then, the Rupee started to gain value against the U.S. Dollar. South Korean currency, the Won, had its lowest value against U.S. Dollar this year by the last week of April. The Won did so after having been depreciating since the first week of March. Dollar from Singapore has also been depreciating since early March after a spike in its value against dollar (Yellow line in the graph).

In order to elaborate these currency series, we took the value of the currency against the U.S. Dollar at its value during the first week of 2015, and use such value as index. The data source is the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, which aggregates the currency data for major U.S. trading partners. The Federal Reserve defines these aggregated data as follows:
1) Broad: “A weighted average of the foreign exchange value of the U.S. dollar against the currencies of a broad group of major U.S. trading partners”.
2) Major Currency: “A weighted average of the foreign exchange value of the U.S. dollar against a subset of the broad index currencies that circulate widely outside the country of issue”.
3) OITP: “A weighted average of the foreign exchange value of the U.S. dollar against a subset of the broad index currencies that do not circulate widely outside the country of issue.