Public Communications and the Foreign Exchange Risk Around the Global Financial Crisis

Abstract

This study explores the effect of four public communication attributes and macroeconomic news surprises on the conditional mean, volatility, and the jump components of the euro-dollar, pound-dollar, and yen-dollar foreign exchange rates from November 1st, 2004 to February 28th, 2015. We extract key attributes from central bank senior official speeches and examine their impact on currencies. We show that price diffusion components respond differently to such attributes across economic states. In addition, volatility exhibits the highest response to the four attributes during the US crisis compared to return and jump components. We find that even though the central bank chairman position has significant impact in general on the price diffusion components, some chairmen have no effect. Yet, the name and personality of the central bank officials matter for the foreign exchange market. We also find that the market fluctuates significantly to speeches related to Economy, Monetary, Interest rate and Real Estate Market during the US crisis. Additionally, central banks play important roles in influencing the market. ECB has a significant effect on returns across all three currencies during the US crisis and plays an important role by affecting the volatility during all periods. Moreover, the central bank chairman can generate greater market reaction than the other positions as it consistently increases the volatility across our sample.