President Obama leaves next week for a high profile trip that includes meetings with other “Asia-Pacific” countries (in the APEC forum) and a visit to China. The President has had considerable diplomatic success on the economic front to date, including at the G20 summit in April and – to a lesser degree – at the follow-up September summit in Pittsburgh.
But the issues facing him now in Asia are particularly difficult, primarily because of China’s exchange rate policy. China essentially pegs its currency (known as the yuan or renminbi) against the US dollar, which means that it rises and – most recently – falls in tandem with the greenback.
Many countries operate de facto pegs of this nature, but China is problematic for three reasons: it is a large economy (10 percent of world GDP, if we adjust for purchasing power), it runs a big current account surplus (exporting more to the world than it buys from the world, in the range of 6-12 percent of the Chinese economy), and it consistently has a bilateral surplus with the US that is galling to many on both sides of the aisle on Capitol Hill (and their constituents). Continue reading “Obama In China: Breaking The Exchange Rate Deadlock”