The trade-weighted US dollar index, also known as the broad index, is a measure of the value of the United States dollar relative to other world currencies. It improves on the older U.S. Dollar Index by using more currencies and the updating the weights yearly (rather than never). The base index value is 100 in March 1973.
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History
The trade-weighted dollar index was introduced in 1998 for two primary reasons. The first was the introduction of the euro, which eliminated several of the currencies in the standard dollar index; the second was to keep pace with new developments in US trade.
Included currencies
In the older U.S. Dollar Index, a significant weight is given to the euro, because most U. S. Trade in 1973 was with European countries. As U. S. trade expanded over time, the weights in that index went unchanged and became out of date. To more accurately reflect the strength of the dollar relative to other world currencies, the Federal Reserve created the trade-weighted US dollar index, which includes a bigger collection of currencies than the US dollar index. The regions included are:
Based on nominal exchange rates
The index is computed as the geometric mean of the bilateral exchange rates of the included currencies. The weight assigned to the value of each currency in the calculation is based on trade data, and is updated annually (the value of the index itself is updated much more frequently than the weightings). The index value at time
where
Based on real exchange rates
The real exchange rate is a more informative measure of the dollar's worth since it accounts for countries whose currencies experience differing rates of inflation from that of the United States. This is compensated for by adjusting the exchange rates in the formula using the consumer price index of the respective countries. In this more general case the index value is given by:
where