Quote Originally Posted by 1orion2many View Post
I thought we had a pretty strong economy, why does our dollar go down everytime the U.S economy is up the duff?? Surely if you have the economy that is performing better you should have the steadier currency. This has never ever made any sense to me and you can say whatever you want until the cows come home, you still wouldn't be able to convince me that it will ever make any sense.
It depends on what your currency is based on.

As Australia's is a commodity-based economy, and commodities tend to be very volatile, any time there is economic volatility it hits our currency quite hard.

The Yen and the US$ are perceived as being more stable, "safe harbour" currencies, as their economies are less inherently volatile. For the US this is mainly due to the chicanery that went on at the Bretton Woods conference after the Great Depression, where the US essentially set things up so they could just keep printing and borrowing money and no-one would ever call in the debts.