I don’t generally comment on pieces that reference me, but Jordan Weissman has given me such a beautiful teachable moment that I can’t resist. Weissman wrote about Donald Trump’s reversal on his campaign pledge to declare China a currency manipulator. Weissman assures us that Trump was completely wrong in his campaign rhetoric and that China does not in fact try to depress the value of its currency.
“It’s pretty hard to argue with that. Far from devaluing its currency, China has actually spent more than $1 trillion of its vaunted foreign reserves over the past couple of years trying to prop up the value of the yuan as investors have funneled money overseas. There are some on the left, like economist Dean Baker, who will argue that Beijing is still effectively suppressing the redback’s value by refusing to unwind its dollar reserves more quickly. But if China were really keeping its currency severely underpriced, you’d expect it to still have a big current account surplus, reminiscent of 10 years ago, which it doesn’t anymore.”
Okay, to start with, I hate the word “manipulation” in this context. China isn’t doing anything in the dark of the night that we are trying to catch them at. The country pretty explicitly manages the value of its currency against the dollar, that is why it holds more than $3 trillion in reserves. So let’s just use the word “manage,” in reference to its currency. It is more neutral and more accurate.
It also allows us to get away from the idea that China is somehow a villain and that we here in the good old U.S. of A are the victims. There are plenty of large US corporations that hugely benefit from having an under-valued Chinese currency. For example, Walmart has developed a low-cost supply chain that depends largely on goods manufactured in China. It is not anxious for the price of the items it imports to rise by 15–30 percent because of a rise in the value of the yuan against the dollar.
