Australia’s reliance on Chinese growth is so well established that even a pet shop’s talking birds can recite trade patterns, Glenn Stevens, the Reserve Bank of Australia’s governor, says. He was only half joking. Australia is booming thanks to China’s insatiable appetite for its raw materials.
This has made the Aussie dollar/US dollar exchange rate one of the most-traded currency pairs as a proxy for bets on China – whose own currency is not freely traded.
There is a solid basis for such trades. The annual change in the Aussie dollar’s value against the US dollar looks very like the annual change in Chinese economic growth over the past 10 years.