Skip to main content

When Did China Stop Manipulating Currency?

Image result for us china trade deal phase 1


On January 13, 2020, the US Treasury Department de-listed the People's Republic of China as a currency manipulator. It is worth our while pausing a bit over this.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trade-china/u-s-treasury-removes-designation-of-china-as-currency-manipulator-idUSKBN1ZC2FV

There are three obvious questions that come to mind:

1) why does the Treasury maintain a list of currency manipulators?
2) why was the PRC on the list?
3) why is the PRC now off the list?

The most consequential currency manipulation on the planet of course is that of the United States, arranged jointly by the Treasury and the Federal Reserve. The US dollar continues to serve, through a sort of institutional inertia, as the world's currency OF currencies. And plainly its value IS manipulated for a range of political purposes.

But just as plainly the US doesn't want other countries challenging it for the title of master manipulator. And China, which aspired to have its yuan regarded as the dollar's equal (at least) in benchmarking, is an obvious subject of concern.

That should answer questions (1) and (2) well enough for now. What about (3)?

The PRC is now off the list because President Trump badly wanted credit for at least a "Trade 1" trade deal with that country. His usual trick is to generate conflict, cause a crisis, then back off from that conflict and take credit for easing that crisis. He has played by this rulebook on US/China trade. Now he has a "Phase 1" which does NOT resolve any real issues but gets the trade relations back to roughly where they were before he started the "war."

That's the why of the delisting.

It is worth noting that the least plausible reading of any of this possible would be taking seriously the notion that (1) China used to manipulate its currency and (2) it no longer does so, for which (3) the US Treasury, of all institutions, has now patted them on the back.

No.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge.   We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a maj...
10 comments
Read more

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere.  At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak...
21 comments
Read more

The Lyrics of "Live Like You Were Dying"

Back in 2004 Tim McGraw recorded the song "Live Like You were Dying." As a way of marking the one-decade anniversary of this song, I'd like to admit that a couple of the lines have confused me for years. I could use your help understanding them. In the first couple of verses, the song seems easy to follow. Two men are talking, and one tells the other about his diagnosis. The doctors have (recently? or a long time ago and mistakenly? that isn't clear) given him the news that he would die soon. "I spent most of the next days/Looking at the X-rays." Then we get a couple of lines about a man crossing items off of his bucket list. "I went sky diving, I went rocky mountain climbing, I went two point seven seconds on a bull named Fu Man Chu." Then the speaker -- presumably still the old man -- shifts to the more characterological consequences of the news. As he was doing those things, he found he was loving deeper and speaking sweeter, and givin...
2 comments
Read more