US Dollar exchange rate today

Because it sits on one side of the large majority of foreign exchange transactions — close to nine in ten, by the Bank for International Settlements count — and prices most commodities and cross-border invoices. Even a trade between two small currencies is often executed as two dollar legs. This site is the exception: it derives everything from the euro, because that is how the ECB publishes.

Just under 60 percent of the allocated foreign exchange reserves reported to the International Monetary Fund, down from around 70 percent at the start of the century. The euro is a distant second at roughly a fifth. The decline has been gradual and has gone mostly into smaller currencies rather than into any single rival, which is why talk of a sudden replacement rarely survives the numbers.

It is how many US dollars one euro buys, fixed once on each ECB working day at around 16:00 CET after central banks compare quotes at about 14:15. It is a mid-market benchmark: nobody buys or sells at it. Your bank or card scheme applies its own rate around that level, and the gap is its margin. The 52-week range shows how far the fix itself has travelled.

The Federal Reserve. Its Federal Open Market Committee meets eight times a year, and the dollar responds less to the decision itself than to the shift in expectations around it, which is why the currency can move sharply on an unchanged rate. Beyond that, the dollar strengthens in periods of market stress regardless of US conditions, because it is what investors hold when they want cash.