Homeland Investment Act and the Dollar

The Swedish Newspaper Dagens Industri this morning published an article that tried to explain the much debated weakness of the Swedish Krona during the spring. According to the article, the U.S. Homeland Investment Act could provide a useful clue. The HIA has let U.S. firms repatriate profits earned abroad during 2005 and a Dollar/Euro chart suggests that it has had a dollar positive impact.

Dagens Industri provides a chart showing "U.S. direct foreign investment" to support its reasoning:
Looking for other opinions on the web, I came up with the following: The investment blog "Always Bet on Black" cautiously exclaimed itself to be "a modest USD bull" in early December. In October TaxProf had an estimate on the amount of repatrieated money tha he found to much exceeded estimates:
Well, here's what has happened: In nine months the law has increased the flow of repatriated foreign capital by a whopping $225 billion. J.P. Morgan estimates that another $75 billion will return to America in the fourth quarter. About half of these returning funds were profits from pharmaceutical companies and much of the rest from such high-tech firms as Dell, IBM and Intel. We can't resist noting that this $300 billion of repatriated capital is nearly double the estimate by Congress's hapless Joint Tax Committee, which had assured us this time last year that not a dime more than $165 billion would arrive. To quote Britney Spears: Oops, they did it again.
Maybe it is time now for the fall in the dollar that economists has been waiting for during quite a while?

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