Share

China Must Wait to Join Exclusive Currency Club

The rest of the world is watching.

Advertisement

The move prolongs from year-end until September 30, 2016, the official update of the “special drawing rights” (SDR) basket, which takes place only every five years.

China has benefited from more-open trade links during its more than three-decade rise out of poverty.

Frank Shannon served in the U.S. Army, was an engineering/operations manager for AT&T for 27 years, was the owner of a small manufacturing business for 23 years, served as Colorado Chair of the Coalition for a Prosperous America and moved to Mesquite in 2013. The next review is expected to be completed by end-2015, with any decisions affecting the current SDR basket to become effective in October 2016. Free-trade-deal critics largely define it as foreign governments’ purchasing large quantities of U.S. debt, which boosts the value of the dollar and suppresses the value of their currencies.

Further slide in the yuan would turn up the pressure on Asian currencies.

The new change has no “direct implications” in the measure used for creating that basket, the spokesman said.

There are therefore two hurdles to the RMB joining the SDR club. “It is stupid”. Japan’s Nikkei index fell by 1.6 percent while South Korea’s Kospi index was down 0.86 percent.

The key, therefore, is what political price China is willing to pay to join the SDR club. The change would make it more hard to levy high tariffs on Chinese goods.

“The PBOC is still intervening”, said Tommy Xie, an economist at Oversea-Chinese Banking Corp in Singapore.

For the past week, the yuan, also called the renminbi, has traded in a tight range after China’s central bank abruptly devalued its currency by nearly 2% in one day. “But on current-account liberalization, I bet the government will postpone”. Have you slowed down a bit, or are you full-throttle into the market’s turns?

There is now a lot of talk about a new normal in China. If money flows into the country too fast, it can overwhelm the system’s ability to handle it, they added. The study identifies China, Denmark, Hong Kong, South Korea, Malaysia, Singapore, Switzerland and Taiwan as most heavily engaged in currency interventions. “But there’s never a flawless time for reform”. This is because significant easing would risk making worse the credit and investment vulnerabilities, the International Monetary Fund said. “It’s just a puppet of the U.S.”, wrote news portal iFeng.com, in a commentary that received more than 900 likes.

Advertisement

China, the world’s second- biggest economy, had wanted the International Monetary Fund to include the yuan in the basket along with the US dollar, euro, British pound and Japanese yen starting on January 1.

The IMF appears to have given a signal that it’s not likely to add the renminbi into its basket of special drawing rights this year