US urges China to open trade, holds off on currency manipulator tag
But US Treasury keeps China on watch list – along with Japan, South Korea and Germany
The United States has stopped short of branding China a currency manipulator, but urged the world’s second-biggest economy to let the yuan rise with market forces and embrace more trade.
No major trading partner is manipulating its currency for an unfair trade advantage, according to the first foreign-currency report released by the US Treasury Department under US President Donald Trump on Friday. It kept China, South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Germany and Switzerland on its foreign-exchange monitoring list.
“China currently has an extremely large and persistent bilateral trade surplus with the United States, which underscores the need for further opening of the Chinese economy to American goods and services,” as well as quicker reforms to boost household consumption, according to the Treasury report.
Trump declared on Wednesday that he would back away from a campaign promise to name China a currency manipulator, a move that would have created friction between the world’s largest economies as they try to boost trade cooperation and address North Korea’s nuclear threat. Trump, in a Wall Street Journal interview, said China had not manipulated the yuan for months, while accusing nations that he didn’t identify of devaluing their currencies and saying the US dollar is getting too strong.