KEY POINTS:
A year ago, almost to the day, the dollar hit a five-month low of US66.70c, a welcome respite from the eye-watering post-float high of US81.1c touched less than four weeks earlier.
At the time Finance Minister Michael Cullen expressed his satisfaction at the kiwi's plunge but told a business gathering it was still overvalued given economic fundamentals.
Cullen probably wasn't alone in hoping for a fall in the currency that would help the export sector gain some traction.
However, that wasn't to be. While it was the US sub-prime-related credit crunch and the ensuing risk aversion that saw international investors sell out of the kiwi, pretty soon they were dumping the greenback on growing signs of trouble for the US economy.
Things weren't helped when the US Federal Reserve slashed interest rates in order to stave off a meltdown at the same time as the Reserve Bank was delivering its coup de grace to the housing market by way of yet more OCR increases.
As the graph shows, by October last year the kiwi was back at US77c and broke through US80c again in February this year.
As the interest differential continued to widen on further Fed rate cuts the kiwi charged all the way back up the scale to hit another series of fresh post-float highs early this year.
The kiwi's retreat and recovery over the last 12 months, while galling for exporters, was probably accepted with a degree of stoicism born of previous false dawns.
When the kiwi hit two-year lows in 2006 economists and currency strategists widely tipped it to fall further and exporters failed to take out significant hedging, only to see the currency charge higher for the best part of the next two years.
On that basis, while the export sector no doubt welcomes the kiwi's recent falls, they could hardly be blamed for keeping the champagne on ice.
