Every week for the past three months, headlines in financial newspapers have announced that the eurozone is on the brink of disaster. The casualties, thus far, include the leaders of Italy and Greece; Dexia, the French-Belgian bank, and most recently MF Global, the American brokerage. Despite last week's coordinated actions by central banks to free up transatlantic capital, some analysts still forecast a calamitous outcome. Standard and Poor's move to put 15 eurozone countries on notice for a possible debt downgrade doesn't help.
Perhaps the most surprising aspect of the crisis is the fact that it has not prompted the euro, the currency that holds the continent together, to fall significantly against the U.S. dollar and British pound, its closest international counterparts. On November 21, research from Credit Suisse said that the euro is entering "its last days as we currently know it." Yet the euro currently trades at $1.34 against the dollar, which is roughly where it was trading in 2007, and not far off from where it was at the beginning of this year.
There are several explanations for this resilience. The most obvious is a lack of good alternatives to the euro. Near-zero interest rates in the U.S. make dollar investments unprofitable, so large pension funds and other reserve funds that must diversify their portfolio can't put all their assets in dollar-denominated investments. The American and British governments have their own debt problems, too, and this has kept investors duly wary.
Meanwhile, interventions by the Swiss and Japanese governments to prevent the franc and yen from rising have taken those respective currencies out of the trading game. "The eurozone is one part of the sovereign debt market where investors can still get yield," says one FX trader, "and these investments are propping up the currency."
Another theory is that investors are merely shifting most euro investments to the region's fiscally healthiest countries, like Germany and the Netherlands, but haven't on balance moved much money out of the euro. Last week, German one-year bond yields turned negative for the first time on record, as panicked investors put their money in what they perceived as the safest haven, amid rumors that the euro was about the unravel.
China may also be playing a part in the resilience of the euro. Concerned about its disproportionate dollar holdings, Beijing for some time has tried to diversify into whatever other asset classes it can get its hands on. Research from Standard Chartered says that during 2011, China has been attempting to shift its accumulation of new foreign currency reserves from dollars to euros.
