Go, super peso, go?

Published March 12, 2023

Sarah DeVries

Yay?

If you’re like me and earn your money in dollars, a position that most Mexicans see as plenty enviable, you might have conflicting worries of guilt and alarm at the improving performance of the Mexican peso this year.

Gone are the days of getting 21 pesos or more for a dollar…and coming are the days of – gulp – possibly getting 17 or so. (Don’t ask me when or for how long; most of my research turned up such wildly different predictions that anything I repeated here would be ultimately untrustworthy).

All in all, it’s still a great exchange rate; when I first came to Mexico back in 2002, the peso-to-dollar rate was roughly 10-to-one. But the peso’s recent strength has come as somewhat of a surprise, and if the peso happens to get even stronger, a lot of we dollar-earning immigrants are going to have to think very hard about how to reduce our budgets to accommodate a not-insignificant reduction in our spending power.

Why is this happening? Honestly, I don’t know, and I’m certainly not the person to explain it. Whenever I try to make sense of anything in the world of finance, which is basically a collectively agreed-on imaginary concept symbolized by pieces of paper and metal coins (and digital numbers now too, I guess?), I pretty much go brain dead from boredom.

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