Devalue yuan before Trump takes over, Chinese government adviser says

By Sidney Leng
South China Morning Post, Hong Kong
Wednesday, November 23, 2016

An influential Chinese government adviser says Beijing should stop intervening to control the value of the yuan and instead allow a fall in the currency's exchange rate before Donald Trump takes office as U.S. president at the end of January.

Yu Yongding, a senior fellow at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, wrote in a co-authored article published in the Shanghai Securities News that the Chinese currency was likely to depreciate against the dollar in the coming months and Beijing should permit the yuan to fall as much as the markets dictate while maintaining controls on the flow of capital in and out of the country.

Yu, who was the only academic on the central bank's monetary policy committee when China removed the yuan's peg to the value of the dollar in 2005, said in the article: "Over the next few months, the possible increase of returns on dollar assets ... and capital outflows will bring in bigger depreciation pressure on yuan.

"From now until the president-elect Donald Trump officially takes office is a good period to abandon market intervention and let the yuan fully release its depreciation pressure."

Yu and fellow author Xiao Lisheng said the central bank's current strategy of trying to manage a gradual and controlled fall in the value of the yuan was backfiring and wasting China's hard-earned foreign exchange reserves to prop up the currency. These have shrunk by about US$800 billion from a peak in June 2014. ...

... For the remainder of the report:

http://www.scmp.com/news/china/economy/articl...-should-stan...