Commodity Currencies Take A Dive

Both the Australian Dollar (AUD) and the Canadian Dollar (CAD), two of the major currencies heavily reliant on commodities, plunged today as gold, copper and oil, along with other actively traded commodities fell sharply. Markets stayed focused on the persisting worries over the Euro-zone sovereign debt problems and rate hikes in the Asian countries amid the inflation fears, causing a major sell-off in equity and commodity markets. The AUD has already been on a slide for a week now, since hitting multi-year highs at 1.0180s on November 5th against the US Dollar (USD). Today the slide continued as the AUD/USD fell as low as 0.9724 for the first time this month and the bias strongly remains to the down side. It also dropped against the Japanese Yen (JPY) from 82 to 81.15. The Canadian Dollar also had a pretty bad day, as the USD/CAD soared to reach a three week high at 1.0254, and the CAD/JPY fell from 82.42 to 81.46. As for the AUD/CAD, here the winner was the Australian currency as the pair climbed from 0.9901 to 0.9999, although it later came down a little and currently is hovering around 0.9960s.