The rhetoric a few weeks back from Obama's new Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner on China's currency "manipulation" has generated a bit of a response. Here's a sampling:
The Economist:
Attacks on China’s cheap currency are overdone
CHINA has been accused of “manipulating” its currency by Tim Geithner, America’s new treasury secretary, and this week Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the managing director of the IMF, said that it was “common knowledge” that the yuan was undervalued. You would assume that such strong claims were backed by solid proof, but the evidence is, in fact, mixed.
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The real issue is whether Beijing is deliberately keeping the yuan cheap to give exporters an unfair advantage.
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The evidence that the yuan is significantly undervalued is hardly rock-solid. It probably is still a bit too cheap, and it would certainly be a mistake for Beijing to allow it to fall, not least because this would risk a protectionist backlash from abroad. In the longer term, the yuan needs to keep rising against a basket of currencies. But for now, some of the accusations being thrown at China are wide of the mark.
Tibita Kaneene in Foreign Policy:
... there is little evidence that a currency appreciation would have an effect on the U.S. economy -- let alone a positive one.
During his confirmation hearing before the United States Senate toward the end of January, Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner accused China of "manipulating" its currency. This is not a statement that helps to further China-US cooperation on trying to stimulate the depressed world economy and on other issues- Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is now in China trying to mend some fences. Yet Geithner's statement is a correct evaluation of the Chinese policy of keeping the value of its currency, the yuan, low relative to the dollar and other currencies. It is far less clear, however, whether this and related Chinese policies harm the US and other countries.
