Mexico Extends Intervention After Currency Hits Record Low

28-Sep (Bloomberg) — Mexico will extend daily dollar auctions for two more months as global market volatility continues to pressure the most-traded emerging-market currency, its central bank said on Monday.

The peso trimmed losses after the statement was posted on Banxico’s website and was down 0.3 percent to 17.0183 per U.S. dollar as of 10:59 a.m. in Mexico City. It had earlier weakened as much as 0.9 percent.

Emerging-market currencies last week fell to their cheapest levels against the dollar since at least 1993 as low oil prices and weaker-than-forecast manufacturing data in China spurred concern that global economic growth is slowing. The peso hit a record low of 17.3425 per dollar on Thursday.

“It is the best thing that they can do,” Win Thin, head of emerging-markets strategy at Brown Brothers Harriman & Co. said in an e-mail. The dollar-selling program is “meant to be a circuit breaker when markets get crazy.”

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