It’s only been a matter of hours since Donald Trump won the race to become the new president of the United States of America, yet the world has already started to see an impact.
Canada’s main immigration website already appeared to suffer repeated outages on Tuesday night as Trump took the lead in several major states as his prospects for winning the US presidency become a reality.
The official website for ‘Citizenship and Immigration Canada’ stopped working, with users being shown an internal server error message when trying to access the website – apparently because of the sheer number of people looking to emigrate to the country from south of the border.
Canada is currently a one of the top destinations for UK residents moving overseas, but could this increased demand from US citizens impact the approval visa process for UK citizens? Of course we saw similar hype in the UK following this summer’s Brexit vote. But in reality we haven’t actually seen an increase of people leaving the UK.
Search traffic for “Canada immigration,” “Canada” and “move to Canada” also increased in the United States relative to the last seven days, according to data from Google Trends. Again we saw similar patterns following Brexit with searches such as “moving to Australia” sky rocketing.
As we saw with Brexit, political events have the power to directly affect the exchange rate. If there is movement in the rates this is expected to have a knock on effect for other currencies as well, including the Euro, Sterling, CAD, AUD and NZD.
Capital Economics chief US economist Paul Ashworth has stated that his appointment is very much a step into the unknown because we simply don’t know what type of president Trump will be.
But Trump winning could see markets move downwards, although in terms of currency markets, the US Dollar’s status as a safe haven may mean any initial fall in response to the result would balance itself out. Any movement for the US Dollar, however, has a noticeable impact on the US Dollar’s main currency pairings, and as a result, Sterling, the Euro, and both the Australian and New Zealand Dollars could feel this movement. The Euro more likely than Sterling given current circumstances could strengthen, and following this, the GBPEUR rate would take a hit.
After initially looking like his win would send markets into chaos, markets appear to be getting over their initial panic, and were quickly reassured by Trump’s victory speech.
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