Global Currencies: Wall Street’s bet on global currencies is bloodied with the U.S. dollar soaring - by Luke Kawa and Sid Verma

Politics have foiled the best-laid plans of Wall Street’s currency strategists.

Turmoil in Turkey as well as strife between Italian leaders and the European Union have forced dollar bears to throw in the towel on bets that the rest of the world’s currencies would continue to play catch-up with the greenback in 2018. A continued flight to safety propelled the Bloomberg Dollar Spot Index to a 13-month high on Monday.

The advance prompted TD Securities to close the G10 foreign exchange convergence trade recommended in its 2018 outlook after losses of more than 4 per cent. The team targeted 10-per-cent upside in going long the euro, Swedish krona, and New Zealand dollar relative to the U.S. and Swiss currencies. In early Tuesday trading, the Bloomberg Dollar Spot Index eased 0.2 per cent.

“The soft patch in global growth and the emergence of Italian political tumult curtailed this thesis even though the ECB signaled the end of QE this year,” writes Mazen Issa, TD’s senior foreign-exchange strategist.

Read more: Wall Street’s bet on global currencies is bloodied with the U.S. dollar soaring - The Globe and Mail

‘Internet: Capacity crunch’: Internet could collapse by 2023, researchers warn

The internet could face an imminent ‘capacity crunch’ as soon as in eight years, should it fail to provide faster data, UK scientists say. The cables and fiber optics that deliver the data to users will have reached their limit by 2023.

Optical cables are transparent strands the thickness of a human hair: the data is transformed into light, and is sent down the fiber, and then turns back into information.

“We are starting to reach the point in the research lab where we can't get any more data into a single optical fiber. The deployment to market is about six to eight years behind the research lab - so within eight years that will be it, we can't get any more data in,” Professor Andrew Ellis, of Aston University in Birmingham, told the Daily Mail.

“Demand is increasingly catching up. It is growing again and again, and it is harder and harder to keep ahead. Unless we come forward with really radical ideas, we are going to see costs dramatically increase,” he added.

Read more: ‘Capacity crunch’: Internet could collapse by 2023, researchers warn — RT News