Government commentators and the local press blame the slide in oil prices for the significant devaluation of the Colombian peso seen in the past 18 months. The graph shows the kind of charts used to illustrate the point. We worked a little harder with some more rigorous statistical analysis and found that oil price movements are indeed important, explaining about 40% of exchange rate movements but this has only been the case since oil prices ‘fell off a cliff’ in the middle of last year.