An American academic says Washington’s accusation that the Chinese government is intentionally devaluing its currency to boost exports is wrong.
Sara Hsu, an Assistant Professor of Economics at the State University of New York at New Paltz, made the comments on Sunday when Press TV interviewed her about the recent remarks by former US ambassador to the UN John Bolton, who accused China of manipulating its currency.
Bolton said that China has a “real weakness in the economy.”
“I think a lot of their statistics are just made up, and I think the collapse in the stock market is an indication of that,” Bolton said.
Hsu rebuffed Bolton’s claims and said that China is doing “what Washington and its foreign analysts have asked Chinese officials to do in the past.”
“I would strongly disagree with what former US ambassador John Bolton has said and I would fall in line with what China is stating in terms of the motivation for its devaluation,” said Hsu, who is also a research director at the Asia Financial Risk Think Tank.
“If they [China] were attempting to devalue their currency in order to boost exports, they would have had to devalue that by even more because the little that they did, devalue the currency, it doesn’t quite make sense in terms of promoting exports,” she added.
“This also flies in the face of their attempts to structurally reform and move away from an export-led and manufacturing-led economy to a more service-based economy,” the academic noted.
The United States accuses China of manipulating its currency to reduce the price of its exports.
China, however, rejects all the accusations saying that Washington uses the Yuan as to distract the public from its own economic problems.
America has long been the biggest importer of Chinese goods. In 2014, China’s exports amounted to $2.3 trillion, more than 18 percent of which was destined to the US.