Agence France Presse said on the 18th that affected by high inflation and economic downturn, the European Central Bank will announce its first interest rate hike since 2011 this week. Analysts at the Bank of Berenberg in Germany recently released a report saying, "the exchange rate of the euro against the US dollar is in a free fall state, and we can't see the bottom yet." Analysts said that the euro exchange rate price target of market participants was between 0.98 and 0.90.
Liang Haiming, President of the Silk Road intelligent Valley Research Institute, said that if the economic recovery of the euro area stagnates in the future, the energy shortage caused by the conflict between Russia and Ukraine and the increasingly serious inflation have not been improved, and the depreciation of the euro has pushed up import prices, it cannot be ruled out that the European Central Bank will eventually adopt stronger policies to deal with the greater depreciation of the euro. However, Liang Haiming also stressed that unless the European Central Bank raises interest rates more aggressively than the Federal Reserve, and the Federal Reserve ends the super "Eagle" monetary policy at the same time, it is difficult for the euro to bottom out and rebound.
The expectation of the market that the euro will continue to fall also means that domestic foreign trade enterprises still need to be prepared for exchange rate changes, order reduction and other issues. Liang Haiming suggested that China and the EU should further play the role of currency swaps, expand the scale of RMB and euro valuation and settlement, and protect China EU bilateral trade and investment from the artificial exchange rate risk caused by the use of third-party currencies (such as the US dollar). According to the bilateral local currency swap agreement renewed by the people's Bank of China and the European Central Bank in 2019, the swap scale of the two sides is 350billion yuan /45billion euros, and the agreement is valid for 3 years. According to the analysis, such local currency swap agreements allow Chinese and European enterprises to directly use this part of funds for bilateral trade, avoiding the exchange rate risk of using a third-party currency.
