Israel’s Biggest Shekel Pessimist Sees 6-Year Low Amid Violence

Daniel Tenengauzer, head of foreign-exchange strategy at RBC Capital Markets in New York, says a combination of violence, China’s slowdown and a giant gas discovery in neighboring Egypt will send the shekel tumbling 10 percent by year-end. He says the mix of domestic and international factors reminds him of when he was living in Jerusalem in the early 2000s, and the Palestinian uprising and dot-com crash pushed the currency to a record low.

“Israel is seeing things now that it hasn’t seen in a long time,” Tenengauzer, the most bearish forecaster in Bloomberg’s shekel survey, said in an interview in Tel Aviv. “The scale now is different than it was in the 2000s, of course, but the fear is that we could be going into a situation where we have a precarious external situation, with markets like China seeing slower growth, and a difficult internal situation as well.”