Tuesday, May 18, 2010

Europe’s Debt Crisis Is Casting a Shadow Over China

The pain of the European debt crisis is spreading, with the plummeting euro making Chinese companies less competitive in Europe, their largest market, and complicating any move to break the Chinese currency’s peg to the dollar.

Chinese policy makers reached a consensus last month about breaking the dollar peg. But allowing the renminbi, which is also known as the yuan, to rise against the dollar now would mean a further increase in the renminbi’s level against the euro, creating even more problems for Chinese exporters to Europe

The steep rise of the renminbi prompted a Commerce Ministry official in Beijing to warn Monday that China’s exports could be threatened. The official’s comments, the most explicit yet on the implications for China of Europe’s recent financial difficulties, suggest that even the world's fastest-growing major economy, and increasingly the engine of global growth, is not immune to the crisis that started in Greece and threatens to spread across much of Europe. Read more

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