China faces a difficult balancing act managing its currency: Strategist

I think the PBOC and Chinese officials have a difficult balancing act that they’re trying to manage. On the one side the economy has been and other than this one particular quarter or somewhat soft. And so there’s been a tendency to think that policy easing has been needed. But at the same token, they don’t want to particularly we currency because that generates a number of different issues. And So what you’ve been seen in the last few months is that they’ve been trying to hold the line. So try to keep Dollar China or Don Renminbi steady. That’s had the side effect that the trade waited. Yuan has actually been appreciated. And so it’s quite, it’s an uneasy, it’s an uneasy situation where you have a lot of different forces moving in the opposite directions. We continue to foresee this continuing for a little while longer. Francesca, I did have a question listening closely to your views on Remnimbi. It’s actually about the competitive levels of of export performance, for example between Japan and China. We’ve seen this quite extraordinary weakness in the yen over the last year or so. Surely this starts to threaten China’s relative export competitiveness. Is there some sort of motivation or or desire do you think in China to equalize or or somehow rebalance these relative levels of competitiveness? What’s your take on likely currency policy? I suspect that the Chinese currency policy is a result of what the officials are trying to, what the government is trying to achieve in terms of growth. So I always view growth and the rebalance of the economy to a more sustainable sort of sources of growth as being the key driver within that. The challenge that the officials have is that if you loosen monetary policy, which is what you probably should do if your economy is weak, the exchange rate would weaken. But in the case of China, when the exchange rate weakens, it generates more capital outflows and it actually tightens conditions domestically. And So what I think the officials are focusing in China is very much on trying to keep dollar renminbi relatively steady. As you very rightly pointed out, this degree of steadiness in dollar China is generating issues against the broader region where the dollar has been appreciated particularly with a Fed that has been more hawkish and now we expect less cuts to come. And so a lot of the Chinese, a lot of the Asian currencies rather are stuck in a bit of a of a tug of war in which some currency weakness is good because it improves their competitiveness. But by that same token it generates sort of it generates domestic inflation. And I thought it was particularly interesting in the last couple of days you’ve had more officials complaining about currency weakness. And so the the Korean sort of officials came up where on the tape yesterday talking about how they’re monitoring the level of dollar Korea. And so dollar China I suspect will remain relatively steady. There’s been a couple of instances in the last few weeks in which the market has tried to get have a go at and moving dollar China higher but hasn’t really worked. But that’s having a knock on effect in other countries whereby their currencies are effectively gaining competitiveness relative to the renminbi. But it’s also generating domestic inflationary pressures, which as the Ministry of Finance in Korea has highlighted, it’s something that they’re monitoring quite closely.