George Soros may have broken the BOE and may well have been at least partially to blame for the Asian Financial Crisis, but he will not win an FX battle with the PBoC. At least that’s Beijing’s message to the billionaire, as conveyed via a characteristically hilarious ‘op-ed’ in the People’s Daily entitled’Declaring war on China’s currency? Ha ha’
Yes, ‘ha, ha.’ Although there’s nothing funny about the $1 trillion in capital that fled the country in 2015 on the heels of the PBoC’s bungled effort to ‘manage’ a controlled devaluation of the yuan.
Although Soros didn’t specifically mention either the RMB or the HKD, he did indicate he is betting against Asian currencies in an interview with Bloomberg TV last week and that, apparently, was cause for Beijing to issue a stern warning.
‘Soros’s war on the renminbi and the Hong Kong dollar cannot possibly succeed – about this there can be no doubt,’ the People’s Daily says, after calling Soros ‘the financial crocodile,’ and blaming the billionaire for ‘increasing volatility in already unstable financial markets.’
Perhaps Beijing knows something everyone else doesn’t, or perhaps the PBoC simply assumes that when Soros mentions ‘hard landing’ and betting against Asian currencies in the same breath it probably means he’s short the yuan, but whatever the case, Chinese authorities have ramped up the rhetoric in the past several days.
This post was published at Zero Hedge on 01/26/2016.
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