For months now, China’s exchange-rate policy has roiled global financial markets, because officials have done a poor job communicating their intentions. But criticizing Chinese policymakers is easier than offering constructive advice: In fact the authorities no longer have any good options.
While Boris Johnson, the likely successor to British Prime Minister Theresa May, takes his country down a path of diminished trade, the European Union is negotiating one of the largest free-trade agreements in the world. One really has to wonder what the "buccaneering" Brexiteers have to complain about.
For months, the world looked on as Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan attempted to reverse the outcome of the city's municipal election. But now that Erdoğan's party has been defeated once again (and massively so this time around), his fundamental weakness has been exposed – as has that of populist authoritarians everywhere.
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NEW YORK – For months now, China’s exchange-rate policy has been roiling global financial markets. More precisely, confusion about that policy has been roiling the markets. Chinese officials have done a poor job communicating their intentions, encouraging the belief that they don’t know what they’re doing.
But criticizing Chinese policy is easier than offering constructive advice. The fact is that China’s government no longer has any good options. No question, the country would be better off with a more flexible exchange rate that eliminated one-way bets for speculators and acted as an economic shock absorber. But the literature on “exit strategies” – on how to replace a currency peg with a more flexible exchange rate – makes clear that the moment when China could have navigated this transition smoothly has now passed.
Countries can exit a pegged rate smoothly only when there is confidence in the economy, encouraging the belief that the more flexible exchange rate can appreciate as well as weaken. This may have been true of China once; it is no longer true today.
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