Credit is expensive, and an overvalued currency makes imported food cheaper than home-grown varieties.
For some, political intervention has supplanted an overvalued currency as the biggest risk in Brazil.
Hence the Swiss franc is the most overvalued currency (by 64%), the ringgit the most undervalued (by 51%).
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The current analysis suggests that the Brazilian real is the most overvalued currency.
Mr Salinas's boom was unsustainable, based as it was on high borrowing, a big current-account deficit and an overvalued currency.
The economic benefits Germany reaps from the current situation imposes a de facto overvalued currency on most other European countries, hampering their exports.
Its symptoms include not just bloated government revenues, but an overvalued currency that is making life impossible for firms in the non-oil economy.
Since the sine qua non of Dutch disease is an overvalued currency, we can see if this is actually the case with the Russian ruble.
Indeed, like Argentina, Italy faces a growing competitiveness loss given an increasingly overvalued currency and the risk of falling exports and growing current account deficit.
Buffeted by the international financial turmoil, Brazil, having doubled interest rates to bolster its overvalued currency, turned to long-term reforms to cut its budget deficit.
Hundreds of factories went bankrupt during the 1990s when national manufacturers, wrestling with a hugely overvalued currency, were unable to compete with far cheaper imported goods.
For succour, Mr de la Rua and Argentina must look abroad, and pray that a slowing economy in the United States will lead to lower international interest rates and a weaker dollar to which Argentina's overvalued currency is pegged.
The fact that at such times bidders were more likely to offer to pay in shares than in cash reinforces the view that misvaluation was driving activity, as buyers tried to exchange their overvalued currency their equity for hard assets while they could.
ECONOMIST: Mergers are more common when shares are overvalued
During his campaign, Mr. Abe argued that the Yen is overvalued and that currency depreciation is needed to make Japanese exports more competitive.
The inflation rate, at 17% last year, was the highest in Latin America even though Venezuela's currency is overvalued.
If a currency seems ludicrously overvalued, interest rates should be cut even if that means inflation moves slightly above target in the short term.
Commercial farming in Mato Grosso has had to overcome formidable obstacles: high transport costs, recently low world prices, a currency till now overvalued, and a chronic lack of farm credit.
If that flight by Chinese nationals spooked foreign investors enough to deter capital inflows, there could be significant downward pressure on the Chinese yuan under a free-floating currency regime, in which case the currency is now overvalued, not undervalued.
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The stock market looked overvalued in early 1998, with a currency crisis under way in Asia and Alan Greenspan beginning to hike interest rates.
If local inflation remains higher than that of the country to which the currency is pegged, the currencies of countries with currency boards can also become overvalued and uncompetitive.
But now the government is shifting its line of attack from interest rates to the currency, which many economists agree is overvalued.
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Besides the Israeli shekel, the other main exception is the South Korean won which, as a result of currency appreciation, is now 8% overvalued against the dollar.
Academic studies suggest that deals financed with equity produce poor long-term returns compared with cash-financed deals perhaps because managers prefer to use their shares as currency when they know their firm is overvalued.
Bidders were also typically more overvalued than their targets, especially when stock was the currency.
ECONOMIST: Mergers are more common when shares are overvalued
Nobody disputes that the crisis in Thailand centred on bad policies notably, its bungled partial deregulation of the financial sector (including the notorious Bangkok International Banking Facility, which encouraged hard-currency lending to weak borrowers), its large and persistent external deficit, and its overvalued exchange rate.
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