The Rand has weakened by about 80 cents to the US dollar since the beginning of the year. With an upcoming election, the resurgence of load shedding, the recent budget speech, and uncertainty over the timing of Fed interest rate cuts, it is difficult to attribute moves in the currency to domestic or global factors.
Below, we show an update to our USDZAR model to try and add some understanding to some of these movements.
We model the USDZAR level as a function of the JP Morgan Emerging Market FX index and the average level of load shedding over the past month. This allows us to break down the level of Rand into a component driven by global factors common to all EM currencies, load shedding, and a residual that covers other South African-specific risks.
Source: Bloomberg
In this chart, the yellow line is the component of the USDZAR that can be explained by global factors; the orange area is the impact of load shedding; and the grey area is the residual that must be explained by other SA-specific risks.
As a check of this model, we have highlighted periods of large positive and negative SA-specific risk that seem to correlate well with material news events at the time.
Based on this framework, the year-to-date weakness in the currency of 79c has mainly been driven by global factors, with the EM risk component contributing 55c and the combination of increased load shedding and SA-specific factors explaining 0.24c.
Based on this model, a sustained reduction in load shedding and a reasonably market-friendly election outcome could see the Rand strengthen towards the R18.16 level that is explained by global factors, but a sustained rally stronger than this level would require more progress on economic reform or a weaker dollar.
Our Market Snippets aim to provide concise insight into our investment research process. Each week, we highlight one chart that showcases our research, motivates our current positioning, or simply presents something interesting we’ve discovered in global financial markets.
For more of our current market views, please visit our website.