Managing The Dragon

U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner certainly thinks so. So do Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer and Republican Presidential hopeful Donald Trump. They all point to the massive trade deficit that the United States is running with China as evidence that the Middle Kingdom’s currency policy is giving Chinese manufacturers an unfair competitive advantage. As we’ve reported [...]

Last week’s G-20 meeting in Seoul, South Korea was intended to be the venue where President Barack Obama would turn up the heat on China to revalue its currency against the dollar. That’s not exactly what happened. In advance of the meeting, the Federal Reserve announced that it would buy $600 billion of Treasuries to [...]

Those of us involved with China on a daily basis have been living with currency issues for a long time. Ever since China began racking up large trade surpluses with the United States, politicians and special interest groups in the United States have been charging that China keeps the renminbi undervalued in order to make [...]

On Thursday, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the Currency Reform for Fair Trade Act, which aims to crack down on Chinese currency manipulation by targeting imports from China and other countries with currencies that are perceived to be undervalued. With a final tally of 348 to 79, the bill was bi-partisan and passed with [...]

On June 19, the Peoples Bank of China released the yuan’s peg to the U.S. dollar, and announced that it would instead peg the yuan to a basket of currencies. China regards the composition of the currency basket as a state secret, and officials haven’t publicly disclosed what currencies are being used in the basket. [...]

After dropping precipitously from over $1.50 at the beginning of 2010 to a four-year low of $1.19 on June 7, the Euro has been recovering ever since. On Friday, the Euro closed at $1.26, up sharply in the week’s last three days of trading. Not wanting to suffer the same plight as Greece, Germany, the [...]

The People’s Bank of China, China’s central bank, announced over the weekend that it will resume a gradual appreciation of the RMB against the U.S. dollar, and that it will manage the yuan’s exchange rate with reference to a basket of currencies, rather than pegging it to the dollar. The PBOC statement makes it clear [...]

The Euro is under attack. As a result of problems in Greece, the massive relief package assembled by the European Economic Union to bail out the country, and economic storm clouds hanging over Portugal, Spain and others, the Euro is tumbling in value against the U.S. dollar. The Euro has declined 14.7 percent from the [...]

The global economy is much more stable today than it was at this time last year, but that doesn’t make 2010 any easier to predict. In January 2009, the debate was all about numbers. Would China’s economy grow by 8 percent as the government was predicting, 7.2 percent as the World Bank concluded, or considerably [...]

Now that all of the state visits are over, Wen Jiabao, China’s premier, drew some pretty clear lines in the sand regarding China’s currency and climate change policies. Speaking at the conclusion of the EU-China summit in Nanjing, Wen said: “Some countries on the one hand want the renminbi to appreciate, but on the other [...]