Eichengreen Says US Monetary Policy Owes to Chinese Intervention

For much of the year, investors have been fixated on when the Federal Reserve will achieve “liftoff” – that is, when it will raise interest rates by 25 basis points, or 0.25%, as a first step toward normalising monetary conditions. Markets have soared and plummeted in response to small changes in Fed statements perceived as affecting the likelihood that liftoff is imminent.

But, in seeking to gauge changes in US monetary conditions, investors have been looking in the wrong place. Since mid-August, when Chinese policymakers startled the markets by devaluing the renminbi by 2%, China’s official intervention in foreign exchange markets has continued, in order to prevent the currency from falling further. The Chinese authorities have been selling foreign securities, mainly US Treasury bonds, and buying up renminbi.

This is the opposite of what China did when the renminbi was strong. Back then, China bought US Treasury bonds to keep the currency from rising and eroding the competitiveness of Chinese exporters. As a result, it accumulated an astounding $4tn of foreign reserves.

And what was true of China was also true of other emerging-market countries receiving capital inflows. These countries’ foreign reserves, mainly held in US securities, topped $8tn at their peak last year.

The effects of these purchases attracted considerable attention. In 2005, US Federal Reserve chair Alan Greenspan pointed to the phenomenon as an explanation for his famous “conundrum”: interest rates on Treasury bonds were lower than market conditions appeared to warrant. His successor, Ben Bernanke, similarly pointed to purchases of US debt by foreign central banks and governments as a reason why American interest rates were so low.

via The Guardian

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Alfonso Esparza

Alfonso Esparza

Senior Currency Analyst at Market Pulse
Alfonso Esparza specializes in macro forex strategies for North American and major currency pairs. Upon joining OANDA in 2007, Alfonso Esparza established the MarketPulseFX blog and he has since written extensively about central banks and global economic and political trends. Alfonso has also worked as a professional currency trader focused on North America and emerging markets. He has been published by The MarketWatch, Reuters, the Wall Street Journal and The Globe and Mail, and he also appears regularly as a guest commentator on networks including Bloomberg and BNN. He holds a finance degree from the Monterrey Institute of Technology and Higher Education (ITESM) and an MBA with a specialization on financial engineering and marketing from the University of Toronto.
Alfonso Esparza