Falling Euro Will Hurt US Economy Too

Currencies are like ghosts — you can never quite get your hands around them, yet they can haunt an economy’s growth rate or an investor’s portfolio forevermore. Perhaps that is because the value of a dollar or a euro is at best a guesstimable number — dependent on the present moment’s madness of crowds and popular opinion, or the next minute’s rationality of longer-term fundamentals. Relative annual price swings of 10 to 20 percent vs. alternative choices are commonplace. And this appears to be the case for the euro when compared with the dollar, pound, yen and perhaps even the upstart and tightly controlled Chinese yuan. It could go up or down — anywhere, really — based upon this week’s policy decisions involving the European Union, the International Monetary Fund, the G-5 central banks and, of course, the markets’ herd-like interpretation of them.