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Currency Market Participants' Mental Model and the Collapse of the Dollar: 2001-2008

John Harvey

No 200901, Working Papers from Texas Christian University, Department of Economics

Abstract: It is well accepted among Institutionalist and Post Keynesian scholars that portfolio investment markets are driven by agents' expectations rather than "the fundamentals." This explains, it is argued, why asset and currency prices are so much more volatile than and often clearly out of line with what we would otherwise consider to be their underlying determinants. What is rarely addressed, however, is how those expectations are formed. This paper fills the void by proposing a specific view of agents' expectations based on the mental model they employ to understand currency movements. The paper derives this schematic by examining market participants' psychological propensities and the world view of the subculture of which they are members. It will be shown that the model is consistent with the salient features of the foreign exchange market and it is employed to explain the dollar's fall from 2001 through 2008.

Keywords: exchange rates; pyschology; institutionalist (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 32 pages
Date: 2009-02
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Published in Journal of Economic Issues, December 2009, pages 931-49

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http://www.econ.tcu.edu/RePEc/tcu/wpaper/wp09-01.pdf First version, 2009 (application/pdf)

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