Follow the money...

I know I've said it before, but there really are so many business surveys around these days that even dedicated economy-watchers can't keep track of all of them. Inevitably some slip under the radar.

One you might have missed (and I came across it only accidentally while foraging a while ago for something else on the bank's website), is the quarterly ASB Kiwi Dollar Barometer. It's well worth having a look at: it's quite a decent sized survey (390 firms with turnover of at least $1 million) of businesses' exchange rate expectations and their forex hedging plans.

The latest one came out last week. The headline result was that businesses (averaging out both importers’ and exporters’ views) expect the Kiwi dollar to peak against the US$ around the 81 cent mark  in the March ’14 quarter, and to decline to 76.5 cents by the end of next year. Currency forecasting, many would say, is a complete waste of time, and perhaps these businesses' expectations will prove just as wide of the mark as any other forecaster's. But I doubt it.

For one thing, consensus forecasts across wide groups tend to do better than a single guy with his spreadsheet.

And for another - and this, to me, was the really interesting bit - the businesses are putting their money where their mouths are, as this graph shows.

Notice that the percentage of importers planning to hedge has hit a new high: in real time, with real dollars, import businesses are increasingly taking out protection against the Kiwi dollar falling.

You might wonder (as the ASB economists did) why the proportion of exporters planning to hedge also ticked up a bit in this latest survey - if they really believed the Kiwi dollar is going to fall, they'd be planning to do less hedging. The ASB team commented that "It is likely the recent strength in the NZD has seen exporters look to protect themselves against further increases in the NZD, even if their core view is that the currency will ease over the year ahead".

I think this is absolutely right, because I've seen this happen before. Years ago I worked for a forex consultancy business in London, and our customer list looked like a hospital ward: every corporate in Europe that had run into financial grief appeared to be on our books as clients. Why? Because they were already in such a difficult position that the last thing they wanted was to have forex losses on top of everything else.

And that's where Kiwi exporters are right now. They might believe the Kiwi dollar is going to fall - but they can't live with the risk that it might tighten the screws even further on them with another bout of appreciation.