The capital outflows from China that prompted the country to engage in a shock devaluation are a distant memory, at least according to Goldman's preferred gauge of FX flows....
Yet for all the FX inflows, perhaps the real story is what that "other" currency is doing. As Bloomberg Ye Xie notes, the latest yuan settlement data showed that China’s efforts to push for more use of yuan in cross-border trade and services -- and reduce its reliance on the dollar --has set another milestone: "The percentage of the payments and receipts denominated in yuan in total FX transactions by banks for their clients surged to a record 44% in January, from 16% four years ago." Meanwhile, in a mirror image, the usage of the dollar declined to 51% from 74%.
On the other hand, global usage of the yuan still remains stubbornly low: while yuan payments have jumped, they accounted for 2.4% of the global market share, compared with the dollar’s 38%, according to an analysis from the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications....
Headline should be "dollar balances" instead of "dollars." The flows are accounting flows.
No comments:
Post a Comment