The US Dollar Index Widget

By   February 10, 2008

Will the USD continue to tank, or will the greenback make a comeback? Follow the day-to-day movements with this widget for Mac OS X.

The US dollar index is computed from the exchange rate with the Euro, Yen, British Pound, Canadian Dollar, Swedish Krona and the Swiss Franc. It was introduced in 1973 and was initially set to 100. Since then, it has been as high as 160 and as low as 75, where it is now. If you’re an international investor with US-denominated assets, you almost certainly want to track the US dollar. If you’re an American, you should definitely be concerned with the decline of the dollar as a result of your government’s policies. Lowering interest rates makes the dollar less valuable. And that means inflation and more expensive imported stuff such as oil.

Graphics and idea are from Fabian Graciano. Yeah, that’s why it looks so much more awesome than my previous widgets 🙂 The data feed is graciously sponsored by INO.com. Thank you! Comments, requests and bug reports are very welcome! Just leave your feedback on this website. I’ll do my best to respond.

Download: US Dollar Index Widget.

Instructions: Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger is required. If you’re using Safari, click the download link. When the widget download is complete, Show Dashboard, click the Plus sign to display the Widget Bar and click the widget’s icon in the Widget Bar to open it. If you’re using a browser other than Safari, click the download link. When the widget download is complete, unarchive it and place it in /Library/Widgets/ in your home folder. Show Dashboard, click the Plus sign to display the Widget Bar and click the widget’s icon in the Widget Bar to open it.

7 Comments on “The US Dollar Index Widget

  1. Fabian

    wow, 73.722 and still dropping! i know bernanke is hinting more rate cuts, but he really needs to see where the USD is heading.

    and oil has kept at over $100. the oil widget cant seem to handle it. looks like its freaking out!

  2. geir

    Yeah, it’s like the whole world’s gone crazy! Luckily, I’m long on oil 🙂

  3. ken

    Great widget. Only one I could find that tracks the dollar. I would like to see one that let’s you change the time line however so you can also see what the dollar has been doing longer term. 1W 1M 3M YTD 1Y 5Y Something like that. Any chance this could happen?

  4. hugo

    the dollar will crush in the next 3 months. great time to short it.

  5. Sanjay Suda

    May I suggest that it would be helpful to also include the Aussie Dollar in the basket of currencies that you are using to index the USD. I say this since the AUD, like the CAD is driven by commodity prices also, as opposed to manufacturing and exporting – just a thought, I am not really an expert in these things

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