What the Heck’s Going on with the New Global Reserve Currency, the Chinese Yuan?

A ‘structural change’: capital flight in yuan.
The Chinese yuan fell to 6.722 to the US dollar currently, the weakest since September 2010. It’s down 3.3% so far this year. OK, a squiggle compared to the wholesale drubbing the UK pound has been taking since the Brexit vote, but there’s a difference: the yuan gets managed with an iron fist.
Some folks interpret this to mean that the People’s Bank of China has been weakening the yuan to gain some trade advantages and revive the export boom and kick economic growth back into gear. But evidence is piling up that the PBOC instead has been trying to slow down the yuan’s descent.
And this happened just days after the yuan joined the IMF’s special drawing rights (SDR) basket of reserve currencies, a huge milestone for the Chinese government that has been laboring on the internationalization of the yuan for years, mostly in tiny baby steps.
But the yuan is up against the mega-problems in China’s debt plagued economy, and it’s pressured down by enormous and, it turns out, not officially disclosed capital outflows.
‘If that trend persists, expect further yuan weakness versus the greenback,’ wrote Krishen Rangasamy, Senior Economist Economics and Strategy at the National Bank of Canada.

This post was published at Wolf Street by Wolf Richter ‘ October 11, 2016.