We provide new empirical evidence that world currency and U.S. stock variance risk premiums have nonredundant and significant predictive power for the appreciation rates of 22 with respect to the U.S. dollar, especially at the four-month and one-month horizons, respectively. The heterogeneous exposures of currencies to the currency variance risk premium are systematically rising along the line of inflation risk. We rationalize these findings in a consumption-based asset pricing model, with local consumption uncertainty and global inflation uncertainty characterized, respectively, by the stock and currency variance risk premiums.

We find that an option-based equity tail risk factor is priced in the cross section of currency returns; more exposed currencies offer a low risk premium because they hedge against equity tail risk. A portfolio that buys currencies with high equity tail beta and shorts those with low beta extracts the global component in the tail factor. The estimated price of risk of this novel global factor is consistently negative in currency carry and momentum portfolios, and in portfolios of other asset classes, suggesting that excess returns of these strategies can be partially understood as compensations for global tail risk.