The battle over the Thai baht intensified in the new year, with the currency suddenly dropping even before domestic markets opened this morning. The baht plunged as much as 1.8% on Thursday, the biggest decline since 2007, to 30.226 against the dollar in early Asia trading. That wiped out the gains made earlier this week […]

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From the perspective on the USD, having the baht sharply rise then decline in a span of a day hardly qualifies as it "plunging in it's biggest decline since 2007". This is really just a single volatile happening especially when for the other 364 days, it has been higher. Seems like an arbitrary reason for some Thai news outlets to proclaim a declining baht when it's not true.

41 minutes ago, Kickoff said:

From the perspective on the USD, having the baht sharply rise then decline in a span of a day hardly qualifies as it "plunging in it's biggest decline since 2007". This is really just a single volatile happening especially when for the other 364 days, it has been higher. Seems like an arbitrary reason for some Thai news outlets to proclaim a declining baht when it's not true.

Fake news, CNN style?

A little bit of improvement from today , don’t you think ? 

I see no improvement on the GBP exchange rate.

3 hours ago, Kickoff said:

From the perspective on the USD, having the baht sharply rise then decline in a span of a day hardly qualifies as it "plunging in it's biggest decline since 2007". This is really just a single volatile happening especially when for the other 364 days, it has been higher. Seems like an arbitrary reason for some Thai news outlets to proclaim a declining baht when it's not true.

 

Agreed.  If you look at the chart, it essentially just went back down to about where it was on December 29, before it "soared."

According to the Bank of Thailand, the sharp rise of the baht before year-end was due to "accelerated transactions being closed before year-end." (credit to this article in the Bangkok Post: https://www.bangkokpost.com/business/1826564/bot-baht-below-30-triggered-by-pre-new-year-rush).  

I'm sure someone FAR smarter than me would be able to explain why that happened/what their motivation would be to accelerate the shift in funds, but, once trading started after the New Year, the baht pretty much just went right back to where it was before those moves were made (just as the BOT said it would).  

Much ado about nothing....although I admittedly was concerned when the USD went below 30 for the first time in quite a while.