Search results

China has been provoked into speeding renminbi internationalization. But despite rapid growth in offshore financial markets in RMB, the Chinese authorities are essentially trapped into maintaining exchange controls-reinforced by financial repression in domestic interest rates→to avoid an avalanche of foreign capital inflows that would threaten inflation and asset price bubbles by driving nominal interest rates on RMB assets down further. Because a floating (appreciating) exchange rate could attract even more hot money inflows, the People's Bank of China should focus on tightly stabilizing the yuan/ dollar exchange rate to encourage naturally high wage increases for balancing China's international competitiveness.

We argue that criticism concerning the Chinese dollar peg is misplaced as no predictable link exists between the exchange rate and the trade balance of an international creditor economy. The stable nominal yuan/dollar rate is argued to have stabilized Chinese, East Asian and global growth. However, linked to US low interest rates, Chinese sterilization policies and potentially subsidized capital allocation in China the real yuan/dollar rate is undervalued. This has caused - both in China and the United States - structural distortions and threatens to undermine global growth and stability. We propose Sino-American policy coordination to escape from the policy dilemma, which continues to drive global imbalances.

Under the world dollar standard, a discrete appreciation by a dollar creditor country of the United States, such as China or Japan, has no predictable effect on its trade surplus. Currency appreciation by the creditor country will slow its economic growth and eventually cause deflation but cannot compensate for a savinginvestment imbalance in the United States. Under a fixed exchange rate, however, differential adjustment in the rate of growth of money wages will more accurately reflect international differences in productivity growth. International competitiveness will be better balanced between high-growth and low-growth economies, as between Japan and the U.S. from in 1950 to 1971 and China and the U.S. from 1994 to 2005, when the peripheral country's dollar exchange rate is fixed so that its wage growth better reflects its higher productivity growth. The qualified case for China moving toward greater flexibility in the form of a very narrow band for the yuan/dollar exchange rate, as a way of decentralizing foreign exchange transacting, is discussed.