Blog Assignment 2

http://fx.sauder.ubc.ca/fxidx.html
Tile : Trade Weighted Indices

A trade-weighted currency index is a weighted average of a basket of currencies that reflects the importance of a country's trade (imports and exports).

1. Some groups that would be interested in these statistics would be the Federal Reserve and Federal trade exchange representatives.
2. Trade Exchange rates used in the calculation of the services export and import indexes differ from those used for the merchandise indexes. Foreign currency prices feeding in to the trade services indexes are collected via NZ’s Statistics Commodity Price Survey. These prices are converted to the currency of the trading partner in the trade exchange, in this case New Zeeland dollars using exchange rates for the relevant currencies supplied by Westpac for the fifteenth day of the middle month of the quarter. This is because the fifteenth day of the middle month of the quarter is the day for which respondents are asked to supply price quotes. This means that the price collection and exchange rate dates match.
3. The most recent weighted percent of trade exchange between the United States and Canada is 80%. This indicates that Canada is trading mostly with the United States because 80% trade exchange is the highest weight for Canada and that’s with the United States. The United States current highest trade exchange weight is with Canada which is about 22% followed by 15% trade exchange with Europe.