发帖
雷达卡
source from:WSJ
ECONOMY ECONOMIC DATA
China Foreign-Exchange Reserves Rise for Second Straight Month
China’s stockpile of foreign currency increased by 7.09 billion dollars in April
By LINGLING WEI
May 6, 2016 11:27 p.m. ET
0 COMMENTS
BEIJING—China’s foreign-exchange reserves rose slightly in April—the second increase in six months—but that doesn’t mean money has stopped leaving the country’s shores.
The People’s Bank of China said Saturday that the world’s largest stockpile of foreign currency increased by 7.09 billion dollars last month, to 3.220 trillion dollars. The slight uptick, which follows a gain of 10.3 billion dollars in March, was primarily due to a softened dollar that alleviated pressure weakening the yuan and exacerbating capital outflows and led to a positive revaluation of the reserves.
Still, Chinese businesses and individuals have continued to take money out amid the prolonged economic slowdown. But the pace of outflows has moderated in recent months thanks to the central bank’s tightened controls of the country’s financial borders and its effort to keep the yuan stable—thereby helping reduce Chinese appetite for foreign assets.
Zhu Chaoping, China economist at UOB Kay Hian Holdings Ltd., a Singapore-based investment bank, estimates that a net of 14 billion dollars in funds left China last month. That compares to an estimated 145 billion dollars in January and roughly the same amount in December.
A weaker dollar, as a result of a less hawkish U.S. Federal Reserve, has lent the Chinese central bank a hand in steadying the yuan and easing outflows-—top financial priorities set by the Chinese leadership for this year.
In the past couple of months, as the greenback softened against the euro and the yen, the People’s Bank of China has been able to stem the yuan’s fall against the dollar without having to burn through its reserves. With an eye toward preventing funds from fleeing China, the central bank even guided the yuan slightly stronger against the dollar last month while letting the Chinese currency depreciate somewhat against a basket of currencies of China’s trading partners.
In an editorial posted on its website on Friday, the central bank said the yuan’s exchange rate has been “kept basically stable.”
But the wind likely won’t continue to blow in China’s favor. The dollar showed signs of rebounding in recent days, renewing downward pressure on the yuan. This week , the Chinese currency traded in Hong Kong, where it can be bought and sold freely, fell 0.5%, its biggest weekly loss in six weeks.
“If the dollar strengthens, the yuan likely will depreciate again and capital outflow will also pick up,” said China economist Larry Hu at Macquarie Securities, a Sydney-based investment bank.
So far, the People’s Bank of China has focused its yuan strategy on avoiding big moves in the currency, traders and analysts say. With that in mind, they say, the central bank has been shifting between guiding the yuan slightly stronger against the dollar and when the greenback resumes strength, letting some air out of the Chinese currency but maintaining its overall stability.
But such an approach only works to ease the outflow pressure temporarily because downward pressure on the yuan persists, many economists say.
“The central bank should take advantage of the weaker dollar now by making the renminbi more market-driven,” said Zhang Ming, a senior economist at the China Academy of Social Sciences, a Beijing think tank. The renminbi, or the people’s currency, is another name for the yuan. That way, Mr. Zhang said, the central bank could let the yuan find its true market level without having to worry about it getting pushed down too much by market forces.
Long a catch basin for the world’s money, China started to see money trickling out at an accelerated pace after it unexpectedly devalued the yuan by almost 2% in mid-August. A recent analysis by Macquarie Securities shows that China’s capital outflows totaled 674 billion dollars last year, driven by unwinding of bullish bets on the yuan by investors and companies as well as by accumulation of foreign assets by Chinese households.
China doesn’t disclose the composition of its giant cash hoard. But many analysts and economists believe dollar assets make up about half of the stockpile, followed by those denominated in the euro and yen. The greenback’s recent weakness against its European and Japanese counterparts means that the euro- and yen-denominated assets in China’s reserves gained in value when translated into dollar terms.
Mr. Zhu at UOB Kay Hian put the valuation increase of China’s reserves at about 16 billion dollars last month.
—Pei Li contributed to this article
提升卡
置顶卡
沉默卡
变色卡
抢沙发
千斤顶
显身卡
京公网安备 11010802022788号
