Happy 2016! Any bets on where the CDN $ will go this year?

Happy 2016!  Here's hoping your research this year is smooth, yet full of enlightening surprises!

As always, January 1st is a chance to switch our focus away from celebrating the year that's passed to forecasting the year that's approaching.  With that in mind, I thought I'd write a post or two highlighting key sites and databases that offer economic forecasts. I'll focus on finding out what is expected of the CDN/US exchange rate for the coming year -- since that rate greatly affects my budgets for databases, ebooks, and ejournals -- but you could use these same resources for gathering other forecasts of economic & business measures. 

Let's start by checking out the economists at each of the major Canadian financial institutions:

• TD Economics offers such values as retails sales, GDP, commodity prices, and housing starts/sales.  They also have some regular publications such as their Long-term Economic Forecast, the December issue of which predicts that the CDN dollar will remain at or below 0.83 USD over the longer term.  The November issue of their Dollars and Cents publication, on the other hand, goes into more specific detail as to how far ahead that 0.83 number might be: "We expect the Canadian dollar to hit a bottom of 71.4 U.S. cents in the first quarter of 2016. The currency is likely to remain fairly soft until the latter half of 2017..." 
  
    
• Scotiabank Economics provides a similar set of historical and forecasted economic measures, including a Foreign Exchange Outlook that predicts (Dec. 2015 edition) our dollar will drop to close to 0.72 USD in the last half of 2016, then slowly rebound to get up to just shy of 0.80 in the last quarter of 2017.  
  
    
• RBC Economics Research touches on many of the same provincial, national, and international measures, and if you want to skip all the narrative and go straight to the data, they offer a Forecast Tables & Statistics page. That's where I found their Canada-U.S. interest rates and key FX rates and read that as of Dec. 8, 2015 they anticipated the rate would bottom out around 0.724 USD in the second quarter of 2016, then slowly climb back up to 0.80 by the end of 2017.
  
    
• CIBC World Market - Economic Updates and their CIBC Canadian Research Services page also touch on all the core economic measures, including exchange rate forecasts, and their latest forcast (Dec. 2015) has our dollar bottoming out at 0.70 USD in the first quarter of 2016, then rising back up in the late spring and holding steady around 0.75-0.76 right through to the end of 2017.
  
    
• Over at BMO Financial Group's Economic Research section, their latest (Dec. 23, 2015) Rates Scenario predicts the CDN$ will drop close to 0.70 USD early in 2016, then slowly recover to around 0.75 USD by the end of 2017. 
  
    
• As for the credit unions, Central1's Economics section includes an Interest Rate Forecast (Dec. 2015) in which they state that "A fall below 70 US cents is possible and increasingly likely in the next three to six months."

Overall, it sounds like there's a general consensus that the Canadian dollar should continue its downward trend in the first part of 2016, perhaps getting down to 0.72, or even below 0.70, before slowly regaining some strength over the following 12-18 months, although whether it will top out at 0.75 or rise all the way to 0.80 USD is perhaps too far in the future for any sort of a reliable forecast at this point.

And, again, note that these same sites provide data and analysis on much more than just exchange rates. They touch on many aspects of the Canadian economy (plus each provincial economy), in addition to some international topics. Consider checking the big banks when you're looking for data to support your own analysis of trends in housing markets, interest rates, retail sales, etc. 

Next post: We'll take a look at forecasts available via a couple of SFU Library's databases.