More on the dollar and its growing role as the fault line of the China-U.S. relationship: China, Russia, Brazil, France and the Gulf States are plotting to switch global oil trading out of dollars, according to Robert Fisk writing in The Independent. Instead they would price oil against a basket of currencies and gold. Secret [...]
Posts Tagged as ‘dollar’
October 5, 2009
The Dollar And The Yuan, Not A Turkish Delight
The finance ministers’ meetings in Istanbul over the weekend revealed a deep crack in the veneer of harmony over the global financial crisis that the world’s leading economies have been seeking to present to the world. Ministers from the seven largest rich nations urged China to take steps to strengthen the yuan, a move Beijing [...]
June 27, 2009
Zhou Bangs On About The SDR As World Currency
The People’s Bank of China has found a drum and continues to beat it. In its annual financial stability report, the central bank again calls for a super-sovereign currency to replace the dollar. The bank’s head, Zhou Xiaochuan, has been a cheerleader for this course of action, and caused a stir earlier this year when [...]
May 22, 2009
Dollars, Coppers, Any Old Iron
A new twist in the saga of what China is doing with its still mostly dollars foreign exchange reserves: Brian Jackson, senior strategist at Royal Bank of Canada, reckons that it is using them to stockpile commodities such as copper and iron ore as the voices in Beijing fearing the ever rising cost of Washington’s [...]
March 23, 2009
China Mulls A New Long-Term Alternative To The Dollar
Another straw in the wind that China’s central bankers are toying with the idea of an alternative to the dollar as the global reserve currency: Hu Xiaolian, director of the State Administration of Foreign Exchange (SAFE) and a central bank vice governor, says that the IMF could raise funds quickly by issuing bonds, and that [...]
October 27, 2008
Dollar-Bound
Even with a slowing economy and export markets slowing faster, China has a lot of trade surplus dollars to recycle. Its foreign-exchange reserves are in excess of $1 trillion and they sit mostly in U.S. dollar-denominated assets.
The American currency depreciated steadily for the past four years, though it has rallied recently. This may be a [...]
April 10, 2008
Yuan Rises Through Symbolic Dollar Level
The People’s Bank of China fixed the yuan’s reference rate at 6.9920 today, the first time the currency has broken above the seven to the U.S. dollar level since 1994. It came a few days after U.S. Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson’s visit, but if the two had coincided it might, in retrospect, have looked a [...]
March 31, 2008
Inflation More Than Washington Behind Yuan’s Rise Against Dollar
When U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson arrives in Beijing on Wednesday, the Chinese currency might coincidental break through the symbolic seven to the dollar level. As Richard McGregor writes in the FT “the currency has become a litmus test of Chinese responsiveness to U.S. complaints on trade.”
Yet what really is driving the recent strengthening of [...]
November 20, 2007
China’s Dollar Dilemma
China is in a currency bind. The slump in the dollar against currencies like the euro, sterling and the Canadian dollar is reducing the value of China’s $1.4 trillion of foreign exchange reserves, which are largely held in dollar denominated assets.
Prime Minister Wen Jiabao said in Singapore on Monday that the dollar’s weakness was [...]
