It's manipulation. The RMB has been artificially fixed for decades for targetted economic/political reasons. It's being adjusted now not so that it can seek to a market value but to target another specific value for political/economic reasons. No one argues this. The PRC manipulates it's currency. It always has. It certainly doesn't seem likely to stop.

That said: this is what trade wars look like, folks. If we didn't want to fight in one we shouldn't have started it. The currency-manipulated status quo of the past two decades or so has lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty and made the world richer than it ever has been.

But no, someone's gotta score domestic political points based on a poor understanding of economics and some intuition about how to make a good populist argument.

Oh, that China engages in currency manipulation is not really up for debate.

What I find humorous is that this particular move seems to be driving the currency closer to the consensus opinion on where it should be.

If the RMB was left to find a market value, it would fall way below 7 to probably 7.5 or even 8 something. Yes, it is being manipulated, but in the other way that Trump says it is. The Chinese are simply running out of the dollars needed to keep manipulating it so that it stays stronger than 7!

The simple irony is that if the Chinese were just to give up manipulating the RMB all together, Trump would be even more angry.

Everyone manipulated, the Japanese and Koreans do it, even the Swiss do it. The only thing that the Chinese do differently is have non market exchanges and currency controls on convertibility. (And their central bank is much less independent than the fed).

There is a certain criteria, and neither Swiss, Koreans, or Japanese meet that criteria.

Could you be more specific?

And, did China meet the criteria before this latest move?

(And, minor nit: criterion is singular. Criteria are plural.)

Yes, but the “criteria” are vague and arbitrary, so there might as well be none at all. This is purely a political decision, not an empirical one.

The problem is that it's hurting the USA economy, too.

In economics: if somebody is doing it cheaper then you can, especially if they are willing to lose money doing it (which is what subsidies accomplish), then you let them. You focus on what will make you money.

Which means for the national economy I have zero doubt that Trump's actions will save and/or create a 10-30 thousand jobs. The problem is that he will be sacrificing many more thousands of jobs and hurting the standard of living for most of the 300 million people living in the USA to do it.

Not to mention that USA debt from Trump/Congress's spending needs to be bought by somebody. The people that been doing that are the Chinese. So if he does manage to collapse their economy it's only shooting the Federal Government, and ultimately, the USA Dollar in the foot.

So much grandstanding. So little sense.

Comments critical of Trump are getting downvoted and the users throttled. Not sure what is going on.

I think its a combination of a few things. First I think there are automod policies that use keywords in these conroversial topics to throttle. Second I think an ugly truth people don't want to admit is tech is heavily slanted to his supporters and those who find his values appealing due to the gender, class and age weighting in the industry, and nationality on this site being predominately American. Third there is a concentrated effort in every relatively neutral forum to downvote/argue/oppose, some of which is organic and some active measures. You often see an initial and rapid hit and downvoting of comments critical of him or the country in general, but then as the other hemisphere wakes up it balances out.

That's reversed. They artificially weaken their currency, and recently weakened it even more.

Your sentence assumes their currency should be low, and they raise it, but evidence is the other way around.

No, it’s the reverse of that: they’ve been artificially strengthening their currency, and are simply slipping to a more reasonable market based value ATM. The CNH exchange provides evidence that the currency should be weaker, it has been that way for a very long time!

Not lately. They’ve been propping it up.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-08-05/u-s-treas...

Check the June quote from Mnuchin where he promises to do this if they stop propping their currency up.