Trump Reuters interview: China accused of currency manipulation

President Donald
Trump.
Andy Wong/AP
Images

• Trump used an interview with Reuters to double down on
  claims that China is a currency manipulator.
• He also accused the European Union of currency
  manipulation.
• Trump has leveled these accusations numerous times
  before, and has frequently threatened to place China on a
  Treasury department list of currency manipulators.

US President Donald Trump has doubled down on claims that both
China and the European Union are deliberately manipulating their
currency.

“I think China’s manipulating their currency, absolutely. And I
think the euro is being manipulated also,” Trump said
in an interview with Reuters. He also
publicly criticised Federal Reserve Chair Jerome
Powell in the same interview, breaking presidential
convention.

“What they’re doing is making up for the fact that they’re now
paying… hundreds of millions of dollars and in some cases
billions of dollars into the United States Treasury,” Trump told
Reuters.

“And so they’re being accommodated and I’m not. And I’ll still
win.”

Trump has frequently criticised China for his belief that Beijing
is artificially weakening the yuan in order to make Chinese
exports more competitive, something he believes China is doing to
hurt the US economy.

In April, he
tweeted: “Russia and China are playing the Currency
Devaluation game as the U.S. keeps raising interest rates. Not
acceptable!”

Prior to his election as president,
he wrote an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal in which he
claimed that from “day one of a Trump administration, the US
Treasury Department will designate China a currency manipulator.”

Nearly two years on from his election, however, the Treasury has
so far failed to formally name China as a manipulator, despite
Trump’s accusations.

The Treasury Department releases semiannual reports on the
foreign exchange policies of major trading partners where they
monitor for currency manipulation. The latest report, released in
June, said China runs a trade and current account surplus with
the US. But officials said Beijing had not been directly
intervening in its currency market.

Unlike most other currencies that float freely, China’s central
bank intervenes to keep the currency in a trading range but
maintains that it does not.