Chile Forum

dow below 8000, strike in chile, could we see 800 on the peso by x-mas?

Oil below $50, peso again at 2005 level. There's massive inventory of cars and houses to bed flushed in the U.S. and elsewhere, and little cash/credit to mop said inventory. I'm thinking absorbing inventories and down-sizing over-capacity (from car manufacturing to retail space) is going to take a while, so the low peso is here to stay IMHO.

so maybe...in a perverse sort of way....my decision to leave the US and shift my assets to chile in 2009 will turn out to be be a good one from a financial perspective.....i was gonna do it anyway, for other reasons, but if i can 650 to 700 pesos to the dollar, then that certainly makes it easier to do certain things...like buy some property.

how does that old saying go? something about silver linings?

cali_chile48 wrote:the dollar jumped from 620 to 645 today.....any particular reason why?

Try looking on this page. There are usually updates on the dollar at 9:30am and 1:30pm:

http://www.economiaynegocios.cl/noticias/index.asp

Assuming your Spanish is OK...

James.

xe.com is the best I have found so far for live rates on the net.

I use xe.com too and usually find it very reliable (I have also used it to send money abroad without problems). However, just occasionally it seems to get out of sync with the Chilean market. For example, on Monday this week it persistently claimed that the rate was 630 when I was reading in El Mercurio that $1 was trading locally for 640. I tried changing some money (if only I had a crystal ball) and got 639. Afterwards the rate on xe.com went up. This isn't the first time I have seen it show the "wrong" numbers, though it is unusual. I think it must be due to local forex market variations. If anyone has a better explanation or information on a local Chilean exchange rate feed, I'd be interested. I looked at "forex.cl", but it seems to be mainly a (fairly large) trading facility and I could see any rates information there.

As for the El Mercurio link, I use that not to get the rates, but to try to understand them . They usually have a quick analysis of why the peso goes up or down.

Cheers,

James.

Sorry, that's not quite true -- in case you're wondering how I get 1 peso off the base/mid-market rate, I happen to know (from experience and xe.com) that my bank usually sells me pesos for 1.2% below the mid-market rate. So I had added that amount back in without thinking to get to 639, for comparison. What I really got is 632... which of course would be impossible if the mid-market rate were 629.7 on Monday as xe.com still claims.

"Street" rate was 645 on Wed when I arrived, I'll be out again this am to change some more, looks even better!

MikieO wrote:"Street" rate was 645 on Wed when I arrived, I'll be out again this am to change some more, looks even better!

I couldn't help myself. I had to resurrect this thread just to remind everyone what a difference a year makes. MikieO's post above was made November 21, 2008. Never panic. Never rejoice. Just hedge with a nice bottle of Chilean wine.

Pat Mc

Yeah, blast from the past.

Some were adamant that 1000 was in the offing.

Since hindsight is 20 / 20 , I can proudly say that I was not one of them.

After watching what happened last Summer when hedgies and other Wall Street vermin received their margin calls and started selling anything not bolted to the floor, why would the next round be any different? Yes the USD is down, but when TSHTF and this latest bubble blows up in their face, commodities are going to sell off (again), and everybody and their brother will be tripping over themselves to buy dollars. Think about it, what else can they do with a significant chunk of cash? Like it or not, no other currency can support those volumes of exchange.

All specs based on past history projected as future results of systems built by sometimes too rational self-interested string pullers manipulating not always rational crowds.

Another paper run, one more perhaps, then reality will set in and will be quite ugly.

You place your bets and let the chips fall where they may.

Faith in what? Let LT history be the guide.

Suerte.