US dollar falls to $1.019 Canadian

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

According to this Toronto Star story, the Canadian dollar has risen to $0.9812 US. However, I’m not altogether certain that the Canadian dollar is rising relative to other currencies; it may be more accurate to say that the US dollar has fallen to $1.019 Canadian.

I believe that the difference between the currencies is already less than the typical fees charged for exchange; when she visited Toronto, HazelNutCoffee mentioned that she paid $100 US and after the fees got $97 Canadian back.

My web hosting is priced in US dollars, and that price hasn’t changed. Five or six years ago I was paying $160 Canadian for it; now I’m paying $100 Canadian.

2

A couple of months ago we had a poll predicting when the Canadian dollar will go to par against the US dollar. I thought that the people predicting that it’d happen before the new year were nuts. :smack:

3

I was just looking around at some news sites. The news stories mention that the price of oil has risen to $81 US per barrel. But if the US dollar is falling, doesn’t that kind of cancel the price rise out? Is the price of oil rising in euros?

4

That reminds me of something:

How come on books that have a suggested retail price on the back, the Canadian price is CRAZY amounts higher than the US price? I can see that back when there was a bigger difference in price it would be valid, but I have a book I bought that was published this year, the US price is $25, and the Canadian price is $32. That equates to less than $0.80 Canadian to $1 American, even though when it was published it wasn’t much different than it is now. :confused:

I imagine that if I was living in Canada I would be royally pissed off.

5

The prices are starting to change. It takes a bit for them to do so, and eventually they had to be lobbied to make changes (there was an article just last week saying the prices woul be coming down).

6

Oil is a bit different… by agreement it is priced in USD. This is a scary situation because if OPEC decides the USD has fallen too much, it can reprice it in EUR and then the days of “no risk for a falling USD” are over since the oil America needs will have to be paid for in a stable currency that is not manipulated by the US.

I seem to recall that Iran is already pricing in EUR but as the US embargos Iran it has not had much effect.

7

True, but the equivalent price in euros can be calculated. A bit of googling turned up this article from 2004, which states:

(bolding mine) I wonder what the equivalent change is today? Let’s see. If oil is $81.75 per barrel today in US dollars, and the US dollar is…

:: goes to xe.com again to check prices ::

The US dollar is down to $1.01 Canadian! :eek: That’s €0.72. So $81.75 for a barrel of oil is only €58.83.

Starting with the prices for October 2004 from the quoted article, oil has risen from $56.37 to $81.75, or by $25.38 (adding another 38%). But in euros, it’s risen from €44.20 to €58.83, or by €14.63 (adding only another 33%.) So the fall in the US dollar is having an effect, even as oil prices rise in general.

Flutterby, who had to be lobbied to reduce the Canadian prices on books?

8

Publishers, I think. Someone had to be pushed a bit before it would happen. I can’t find the article I read, but I did find this one from a couple months back. I’ve been hearing complaints for longer though.

9

Damn, I’m headed to Victoria for a long weekend next month and was hoping for enough of a difference to cancel out the GMT. The last time I was in Victoria it was about US$100/Cdn $64. I felt like a rich man.

On the plus side, a strong Canadian dollar will bring a lot more Canadians to Montana to ski this winter.

whistlepig

10

There’s a story here on the CBC website about the CDN trading over .99 US in overnight trading after having closed out at $.9864 US.

I’ve been follow the CDN $ against the Euro over the past few months. There has not been the same kind of movement. In fact, it has been quite steady.

11

Remind me to pop over to New York and buy the place in a few months. Should come in at only a few hundred billion dollars, or about £9.95.

12

An article this morning mentioned that the euro and the Canadian dollar have been behaving similarly with respect to the US dollar, since early 2007. Before then, the Canadian dollar tended to mirror the movements of the US dollar relative to other currencies. This suggests to me that the recent motion is in the US dollar.

13

Currencies go up, currencies go down. It’s now US$2=£1. Some years back it was US$1=£1. Some years before that it was £1=US$2.40.

14

So someday soon Canadians that live near the boarder will bitch about getting US coins in their change?

15

I already bitch about it. The vending machines that I use don’t like American quarters. They weigh too damn much.

16

I’ll be asking “How much is that in real money?” more than a few times. :smiley:

17

The vending machines at my work are so fussy that they don’t even accept Canadian coins sometimes.

After all the headline hype this morning, it looks like the US dollar bounced back a bit and is now at 1.014 Canadian (mid-market rate at xe.com). I had seen it as low as 1.009 yesterday.

I asked the guy in the caf whether he was accepting US dollars at par, and he sais he’d always been accepting them at par, even when they were worth 40% more! (Nice way to get a bit of profit…) He said he just doesn’t get them often enough to have special arrangements for them.

18

Unfortunately, as strong as the dollar is, it has been unable to budge the time in Victoria from it’s usual GMT offset. Something to do with conversion factors just not working out :slight_smile:

(You mean the GST - the Goods and Services Tax)

There are a LOT of threads about this today.

19

Many businesses do this. What I’m wondering, though, is whether they’ll continue if/when the US dollar falls below the Canadian dollar.

20

I’ll give you a buck for the Brooklyn Bridge.

Whatever else this fluctuation means, I’m cruising eBay before the US dollar bounces back. :smiley: