标题: No one-off appreciation for 人民币 [打印本页] 作者: schulmacher 时间: 2006-7-22 14:17 标题: No one-off appreciation for 人民币
China will not make another one-off appreciation of its currency, a government spokesman has said, following the release of data showing the strongest economic growth in around a decade.
"As (Premier) Wen Jiabao said, there will not be another surprise one-off appreciation of the renminbi (yuan) through administrative measures," National Bureau of Statistics spokesman Zheng Jingping said Tuesday.
"If anyone wants to play games with the renminbi, they won't benefit from that," he added in a warning to speculators banking on further gains in the yuan.
Date released earlier Tuesday showing the economy grew 10.9 percent in the first half compared with the same period a year earlier, driven by a frenetic 11.3 percent in the three months to June -- the fastest pace in more than a decade.
China's trade surplus also hit a record US$61.4 billion in the six months to June while fixed asset investment climbed 29.8 percent, underpinning growth rates which analysts said make further government efforts to slow the economy much more likely if not inevitable.
They said the data was expected to increase pressure on China to revalue the yuan as part of efforts to better balance the economy and reduce its dependence for growth on exports.
In July last year, the government, under pressure from its trade partners led by the United States, revalued the yuan by 2.1 percent against the dollar and allowed it to trade within set bands against the US and other currencies.
Despite the United States saying the yuan is still being artificially kept too low, China has maintained the current forex regime is appropriate to its stage of development and that it will pursue gradual reform.
Zheng, the NBS spokesman, on Tuesday again defended the system.
"It has come to play a positive role and has been welcomed and met with a positive appraisal from the international community," he told a briefing in Beijing.
While no drastic adjustment was expected, analysts argued that some sort of change was needed to re-balance the Chinese economy and wean it off its reliance on exports and investment.
"China urgently needs to rebalance the economy, cooling down investment and relying less on exports and more on domestic consumption," said Robert Subbaraman, a Tokyo-based economist with Lehman Brothers.
Hong Liang, an economist with Goldman Sachs (Asia) in Hong Kong, said the yuan would appreciate in the second half, expecting its daily dollar trading band to widen from its current 0.3 percent to around one percent.
"Following a weaker US dollar, the yuan has depreciated on trade-weighted terms since late last year, adding further fuel to export strength and diluting the impact of monetary tightening (made in April)," she said.
