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Foreign Exchange Risk Essay

Decent Essays

Foreign exchange risk is commonly defined as the additional variability experienced by a multinational corporation in its worldwide-consolidated earnings that results from unexpected currency fluctuations (Jacques, 1981). Multinational businesses exporting or importing goods and services or making foreign investments throughout the global economy are faced with an exchange rate risk, which can have severe financial consequences if not managed appropriately.

Multinational corporations often sell products in various countries with prices denominated in corresponding local currencies. It is widely recognized that as the volatility in exchange rates has increased dramatically after the breakdown of the Bretton Woods system of fixed exchange rates (Smith, Smithson and Wilford, 1990), multinational corporations may have become increasingly vulnerable to exchange risk since the short term movements in exchange rates are often not accompanied by offsetting changes in prices in the corresponding countries (Shapiro, 1992). Exchange rate exposure is an important source of risk for multinational corporations such as transaction exposure, economic exposure, and translation exposure. Thus, managers of multinational firms employ a number of foreign exchange hedging strategies in order to protect against exchange rate risk. The primary reason companies would hedge foreign exchange risk is so that they do not want to lose money on capital or assets they have stored in different

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