Saturday, April 04, 2009
But these days, both sides of that deal are breaking down. On one side, the world’s appetite for Chinese goods has fallen off sharply. China’s exports have plunged in recent months and are now down 26 percent from a year ago. On the other side, the Chinese are evidently getting anxious about those securities.
But China still seems to have unrealistic expectations. And that’s a problem for all of us.
The big news last week was a speech by Zhou Xiaochuan, the governor of China’s central bank, calling for a new “super-sovereign reserve currency.”
The paranoid wing of the Republican Party promptly warned of a dastardly plot to make America give up the dollar. But Mr. Zhou’s speech was actually an admission of weakness. In effect, he was saying that China had driven itself into a dollar trap, and that it can neither get itself out nor change the policies that put it in that trap in the first place.
Some background: In the early years of this decade, China began running large trade surpluses and also began attracting substantial inflows of foreign capital. If China had had a floating exchange rate — like, say, Canada — this would have led to a rise in the value of its currency, which, in turn, would have slowed the growth of China’s exports.
Read the full article HERE
Friday, April 03, 2009
- India and other developing nations to get a greater say in the international organizations such as IMF and World Bank.
- After 2011, the US could lose its veto power at those institutions and Western countries could find their voting rights severely reduced.
- The convention that an American heads the World Bank and a European heads the IMF will also now be abandoned, the G20 leaders say.
- The G20 also created a new Financial Stability Board, incorporating all members of the G20 for the first time, to replace the current Financial Stability Forum, which mainly consists of the central banks and finance ministries of US and European countries.
- $500bn for the IMF to lend to struggling economies
- $250bn to boost world trade
- $250bn for a new IMF "overdraft facility" countries can draw on
- $100bn that international development banks can lend to poorest countries
- IMF will raise $6bn from selling gold reserves to increase lending for the poorest countries
Source: BBC
Tuesday, March 24, 2009
China's central bank governor Zhou Xiaochuan has suggested that a new currency should be created in order to reduce the dependence on dollar. As most of the world trade is done in the Dollar, Euro and Yen, there is growing concern that world has become a hostage to these currencies. Mr. Zhou argues that most nations concentrate their assets in those reserve currencies(Show below), which exaggerates the size of flows and makes financial systems overall more volatile.
Moving to a reserve currency that belongs to no individual nation would make it easier for all nations to manage their economies better, he argued, because it would give the reserve-currency nations more freedom to shift monetary policy and exchange rates. It could also be the basis for a more equitable way of financing the IMF, Mr. Zhou added. China is among several nations under pressure to pony up extra cash to help the IMF.
Mr. Zhou's proposal is surely going to spark a debate in the coming G20 summit in London.
You can read the full article at Wall Street Journal HERE
