Currency Wars: How Ben Bernanke Outsmarted China
June 9, 2011 By Financial Bin
For years, U.S. officials have ritually complained that China’s currency is undervalued and that the country should let it appreciate. But President Obama soft-pedaled the problem at the White House summit with President Hu Jintao last week.
Why? Washington is quietly celebrating that fact that Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke has outsmarted the Chinese government, forcing it to revalue its currency or face increasing domestic unrest.
“No U.S. official will admit this, but Bernanke has succeeded in breaking the Bank of China in the same way George Soros broke the Bank of England in 1992,” says James Rickards, senior managing director for merchant bank Tangent Capital in New York. “The U.S. has won the first round of the currency war.”
He adds: “People forget that one of the factors that caused the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 was popular discontent with inflation, and the Chinese leadership doesn’t want anything like that.”
China Gets “Hot Money”
How did Bernanke pull off the magic trick that previous U.S. administrations were unable to accomplish? Last fall, he announced a program of quantitative easing — a federal bond-buying program — which was targeted, he said, at raising U.S. inflation to head off possible deflation.
June 9, 2011 By Financial Bin
For years, U.S. officials have ritually complained that China’s currency is undervalued and that the country should let it appreciate. But President Obama soft-pedaled the problem at the White House summit with President Hu Jintao last week.
Why? Washington is quietly celebrating that fact that Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke has outsmarted the Chinese government, forcing it to revalue its currency or face increasing domestic unrest.
“No U.S. official will admit this, but Bernanke has succeeded in breaking the Bank of China in the same way George Soros broke the Bank of England in 1992,” says James Rickards, senior managing director for merchant bank Tangent Capital in New York. “The U.S. has won the first round of the currency war.”
He adds: “People forget that one of the factors that caused the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 was popular discontent with inflation, and the Chinese leadership doesn’t want anything like that.”
China Gets “Hot Money”
How did Bernanke pull off the magic trick that previous U.S. administrations were unable to accomplish? Last fall, he announced a program of quantitative easing — a federal bond-buying program — which was targeted, he said, at raising U.S. inflation to head off possible deflation.