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China's forex reserves up to US$818.9b
(Reuters/Xinhua)
Updated: 2006-01-15 16:59

Tariff threats

Some U.S. senators are threatening to slap a 27.5 percent tariff on Chinese imports unless Beijing revalues substantially, and Subbaraman said such protectionism would grow if the U.S. economy started to slow.

"China's new exchange rate regime has kept the China critics quiet for a while, but I think the honeymoon period's coming to an end pretty soon," Subbaraman said.

Breaking down the figures for the fourth quarter, the central bank said reserves grew $24.7 billion in December, $9.3 billion in November and $15.9 billion in October.

Tang Xu, director-general of the central bank's research department, told Reuters on Jan. 10 that the bulk of China's reserves were invested in dollar assets and scotched speculation that Beijing was selling its current dollar holdings to diversify into other currencies.

The central bank did not say whether the reserves total excluded $8.8 billion in currency swaps that it carried out with domestic banks in November and December.

Even if that sum is added to the headline figure, the rise in reserves is not much more than the combined total of $50.6 billion from China's fourth-quarter trade surplus of $33.5 billion and foreign direct investment inflows of $17.1 billion.

Subbaraman said this showed that little of the increase was due to speculative inflows betting on a stronger yuan: "There's probably not much left over in the figures for hot money."

The central bank also said annual growth in the broad M2 measure of money supply slowed to 17.6 percent in December from 18.3 percent in November. It was the first dip since February.

The bank said it had used a medley of monetary tools to reasonably adjust money supply in 2005, achieving what it called significant results.

"Stable financial operations last year helped promote the sustained, fast, coordinated and healthy development of the national economy," the central bank said.

But the growth rate was much stronger than the 14.6 percent pace of December 2004 and outstripped the bank's 17 percent target for the year.

"It's still a fast pace and that's partly to do with the difficulty in managing this very large balance of payments surplus because part of it is spilling over into the money supply," Subbaraman said.


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