国际货币基金宣布人民币价值公平

还没有正式公布，但今天华尔街日报透露的消息说国际货币基金组织已经内定了，通常此类决定好几个月，甚至一年才定，所以一旦定了，就不会变了。

在人民币与特别提款权里介绍了中国立意要让人民币成为国际货币基金特别提款权的一部分和相应的努力，人民币与特别提款权：为什么，缺什么？提到为达到此目的，人民币大幅贬值可能性不大，而且不论美国反对还是不反对，今年成功成熟高。

此举体现了世界金融局势多方面的逐渐的变化。一是欧美的冲突尽管不大，但在增加，表面化，国际货币基金组织是欧洲出头的，闹得较响。二是世行、国际货币基金组织改革多年受助，演变成发达国家和发展中国家的对立，金砖五国在两个机构里的代表及其不公平，中国成了典型，不平呼声越来越高，这给中国造成有利的机会。这一决定，揣摩美国没法否决，欧洲支持，一投票，过了，这给下一步奠定了基础。

人民币成为国际货币基金特别提款权的一部分，除了增加中国在世界金融市场的地位、影响外，更重要的是让人民币成为世界贸易交换货币，不是（不必，目前也不可能）取代美元，而是在中国相关的贸易中人民币成交为主，就够了。其余的，慢慢来。

2014年，中国进出口总值26.43万亿元，其中出口14.39万亿元，进口12.04万亿元。据高国梁总结的数据：

人民币结算已占进出口贸易的20%，对外直接投资的30%，外商直接投资的100%，跨境货物贸易20%，服务贸易的100%
（2014年前三季度）跨境贸易人民币结算业务累计发生4.82万亿元，直接投资人民币结算业务累计发生7208亿元
（2014年前三季度）以人民币进行结算的跨境货物贸易、服务贸易及其他经常项目、对外直接投资、外商直接投资分别累计发生4.32万亿元、4956亿元、1337亿元、5871亿元。9月份人民币 贷款增加8572亿元 M2同比增12.9%

人民币国际化MBA文库。
人民币国际化百度。

举个例子。如果对外直接投资能全用人民币，接受投资的国家马上可以用得到的人民币到中国来采购设备或其他商品，中国央行可以直接认可，无需现金，甚至账面转账，更不需要为兑换美元和经过美国金融网络而担忧了。

参见：法国央行行长：中欧贸易有可能弃美元，改用人民币和欧元结算
（这远了点儿）

这是人民币的一个里程碑。



《华尔街日报原文》
IMF to Brighten View of China’s Yuan
Fund on verge of declaring China’s currency fairly valued for the first time in more than a decade


The Obama administration disagrees with the IMF, maintaining a view that the yuan, also called renminbi, remains ‘significantly undervalued.’

By IAN TALLEY
May 3, 2015

The International Monetary Fund is close to declaring China’s yuan fairly valued for the first time in more than a decade, a milestone in the country’s efforts to open its economy that would blunt U.S. criticism of Beijing’s currency policy.

The fund’s reassessment of the yuan—set to be made official in IMF reports on China’s economy due out in the coming months—follows years of IMF censure of Beijing’s management of the currency.

The IMF’s latest view undermines the Obama administration’s pressure on China over its management of the currency and could undercut congressional efforts to inject yuan concerns into pending trade legislation.

“It takes the rug out from under the feet of U.S. critics of Chinese currency policy,” said Eswar Prasad, a Cornell University economist and former China official at the IMF. “The U.S. relied to a significant extent on what was seen as the IMF’s objective assessment.”

The Obama administration disagrees with the IMF, maintaining a view that the yuan, also called renminbi, remains “significantly undervalued.”

The shift at the IMF comes as Beijing is increasingly challenging the established global order. In recent months, China has won broad support for its new Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, an entity that would rival the World Bank, the IMF’s sister institution. China is also pushing plans to create a modern “Silk Road” by better connecting its economy with those in the rest of Asia, the Middle East, Africa and Europe. Chinese officials have asked the IMF to include the yuan in the elite basket of currencies that comprise the fund’s emergency-lending reserves, a decision the fund will consider later this year.

The Washington-based IMF, which is the pre-eminent authority on currencies and exists in large part to independently monitor exchange rates among its 188 member countries, has long chastised Beijing for presiding over an undervalued currency. The fund’s judgment gave credence to years of U.S. accusations that China gave its companies an unfair competitive advantage by keeping the yuan’s value below a level suggested by market fundamentals.

U.S. lawmakers and the past three presidential administrations have alleged that China’s economic expansion came at the expense of American jobs, exports and growth, and dangerously distorted the global economy. With breakneck growth as an export powerhouse, China in recent years became the world’s second-largest economy after the U.S.

Now, after a decade in which the yuan has been allowed to appreciate by more than 30% against a basket of currencies, senior IMF officials say the exchange-rate value is roughly appropriate.

“We are now reaching a point where we are close to this no longer being undervalued,” Markus Rodlauer, deputy director of the IMF’s Asia department, said last month.



The IMF is expected to use its typically cautious and diplomatic style in characterizing the currency’s latest position, likely avoiding the term “fairly valued” in its official statements. Mr. Rodlauer, for instance, said last month the currency is “moving towards equilibrium.” Thus, the fund’s official assessment could leave enough wiggle room to reverse course if China alters its policy and remain vague enough to give critics room for skepticism.

The yuan is roughly pegged to the dollar, and as the U.S. currency has appreciated against most other major currencies, it has helped push up the value of the yuan. In nominal terms, the yuan’s appreciation has leveled off. But accounting for inflation, the value of the currency has risen by more than 10% in the past year alone.

As China’s economy cools, some economists don’t rule out Beijing depreciating the yuan again to help juice exports and prop up its expansion. That or other major changes to underlying economic fundamentals could still change the IMF’s early evaluation of the yuan. China’s economic growth slowed to 7.4% in 2014, downshifting to a level not seen in a quarter century and firmly marking the end of a high-growth heyday.

Meanwhile, China’s factories in April suffered their fastest drop in activity for a year as new orders fell, a private business survey showed on Monday.

Beijing has gathered the backing of a host of U.S. allies and fund officials have signaled IMF reserve-currency status for the yuan is only a matter of time. Some analysts say that effort is a key reason why China has curbed yuan intervention and fostered a stable currency in the past year.

The assessment of the yuan remains a deeply sensitive issue for the IMF. For several years, China wouldn’t let the fund publish an annual review of the economy in part because of criticism of the exchange-rate policy.

At the height of China’s bloated trade surplus in 2007, the U.S. Treasury Department fought a year-long battle with fund officials and the IMF’s biggest shareholders to get the fund to label the yuan “fundamentally misaligned.”

In 2008, just a week before a board meeting scheduled to tackle the controversial issue, the global financial crisis erupted with the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy. The meeting was canceled. Since then, Beijing has bulked up on U.S. government debt as Washington borrowed heavily to fight the crisis and stabilize the American economy.

The yuan’s appreciation in recent years has bolstered arguments from U.S. administrations to Congress to let the Treasury Department use diplomacy, rather than sanctions, to drive changes in trade partners’ currency policies. That message is being sent again as the Obama administration tries to dissuade lawmakers from including punitive currency-manipulation measures in pending trade legislation, efforts Treasury officials say could kill the pending Trans-Pacific Partnership, a trade pact among 12 nations that represent 40% of the global economy.

U.S. officials don’t accept the IMF’s assessment. “China’s exchange rate remains significantly undervalued,” Nathan Sheets, U.S. Treasury undersecretary for international affairs, said last week.

Mr. Sheets, echoing the Treasury’s recent semiannual report to Congress on the currency policies of major trading partners, said China’s rising trade surplus, falling oil prices, higher levels of productivity and the need to foster more domestic consumption mean the yuan should trade at higher levels.

Mr. Sheets, Treasury’s top financial diplomat, said the real test of Beijing’s commitment last year to curb currency interventions will be if authorities resist the temptation to depreciate the yuan amid those pressures on its currency.

Gauging the appropriate value of exchange rates is far from exact science given the number of variables at hand.

But two economic metrics long revealed the extent of Beijing’s currency intervention: trade and foreign-currency reserves. Fueled by a devalued currency, China’s trade surplus topped out at more than 10% of the country’s gross domestic product in 2007 and helped drive a U.S. trade deficit that averaged 5% in the years leading up to the financial crisis. As Beijing bought dollars, euros and yen to keep a lid on the yuan’s value, it built up a $4 trillion stockpile of foreign-exchange reserves, the largest in the world.

China’s massive trade surplus has fallen since 2007 in part because of the yuan’s appreciation, but also because global demand collapsed in the wake of the financial crisis. That raised concerns from some economists that if Beijing doesn’t move fast enough to an economic model more reliant on domestic consumption, China’s trade surplus could once again balloon.

The country’s trade surplus has since declined to around 2.5% of GDP, and currency interventions have fallen to a trickle by comparison, IMF economists and outside experts say. “By both measures, it has become untenable to regard the renminbi as significantly, or even moderately, undervalued,” said Mr. Prasad, the former IMF economist. In fact, he said China is now propping up the value of the yuan to prevent it from falling, partly out of fear that it will be accused of depreciating its currency.

Zhu Haiquan, a spokesman for the Chinese embassy in Washington, said authorities will continue long-running plans to gradually allow the yuan to float more freely. “We will comprehensively push forward reform and opening up,” Mr. Zhu said.

Earlier last month, Chinese central banker Zhou Xiaochuan told the IMF’s policy committee that Beijing plans to roll out several policies this year that will make the currency more internationally usable.

Last year, the IMF targeted the yuan as “moderately undervalued” by 5% to 10%. Other countries, such a South Korea, Singapore and Malaysia, were also censured for exchange rates that didn’t reflect economic dynamics. But China’s undervaluation has had heftier consequences for the global economy.

Now, Germany has surpassed China as the world’s largest trade-surplus economy. Its trade surplus, projected by the IMF to hit 8.4% of GDP this year, would be the largest the European powerhouse has recorded in decades. That has put Berlin in the cross hairs of the Obama administration, which says Germany’s economic policies undermine growth elsewhere in the 19-nation eurozone and blunts the global recovery.

Meg Lundsager, a former U.S. representative to the IMF’s executive board, said that while an IMF fair-value designation of the yuan would be a milestone in Beijing’s efforts to liberalize its economy, Chinese authorities still have a long way to go. “If China is really ready, why can’t it have a market-determined exchange rate and interest rate, and stop accumulating foreign currency reserves?” asked Ms. Lundsager, now a fellow at the Wilson Center, a Washington think tank. “That’s the real test.”

But Fred Bergsten, a former U.S. Treasury diplomat and a founder of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, said Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew faces risks from pressing China to allow greater currency flexibility.

Many economists say China’s weakening economy is likely putting downward pressure on the yuan. “Abandonment of their dollar peg at this time would probably lead to a significant depreciation, strengthening their competitiveness and trade surpluses with adverse effects on our economy,” said Mr. Bergsten, a longtime critic of Beijing’s currency policy.

That would likely reignite “congressional charges of manipulation and add further difficulty to passage of the pending trade legislation,” he said.