China’s central bank said it would expand a trial for yuan cross-border settlements to the entire country, in the latest step toward making the Chinese unit an international currency.
The number of companies permitted to settle international transactions in yuan would also be increased, the People’s Bank of China said in a statement posted on its Web site on Wednesday.
The joint statement issued by the central bank and the country’s banking, securities and insurance regulators gave no timeframe for the expansion.
The move was designed in part to “spread the foreign exchange risk exposure faced by companies going abroad,” the statement said.
Beijing announced in December last year that it would start allowing the yuan to be used to settle international accounts on a trial basis.
It represented a move toward increasing the currency’s international use and making it convertible.
The government this year gave the green light to 365 firms in Shanghai and four cities in southern Guangdong Province to use the yuan to settle transactions with Hong Kong, Macau and ASEAN.
At the end of September, the value of transactions using the Chinese currency had reached more than 100 million yuan (US$14.6 million), official data showed.
However, the Bank of China (中國銀行), one of the country’s big-four state-owned lenders, said this week it had handled more than 1.1 billion yuan in cross-border trade settlements by Dec. 21.
HANDOVER POLICY: Approving the probe means that the new US administration of Donald Trump is likely to have the option to impose trade restrictions on China US President Joe Biden’s administration is set to initiate a trade investigation into Chinese semiconductors in the coming days as part of a push to reduce reliance on a technology that US officials believe poses national security risks. The probe could result in tariffs or other measures to restrict imports on older-model semiconductors and the products containing them, including medical devices, vehicles, smartphones and weaponry, people familiar with the matter said. The investigation examining so-called foundational chips could take months to conclude, meaning that any reaction to the findings would be left to the discretion of US president-elect Donald Trump’s incoming team. Biden
Intel Corp chief financial officer Dave Zinsner said that a formal separation of the company’s factory and product development divisions is an open question that would be decided by the chipmaker’s next leader. Zinsner, who is serving as interim co-CEO following this month’s ouster of Pat Gelsinger, made the remarks on Thursday at the Barclays technology conference in San Francisco alongside co-CEO Michelle Johnston Holthaus. Intel’s struggles to keep pace with rivals — along with its deteriorating financial condition — have spurred speculation that the next CEO would make dramatic changes. That has included talk of a split of the company’s manufacturing
HOUSING: The uptick to 2.24 percent came despite the central bank leaving its policy unchanged for two quarters and raising lenders’ required reserve ratios Mortgage interest rates last quarter spiked to a 15-year high of 2.23 percent despite a decline in loan applications, as local lenders slowed real-estate lending to support the central bank’s credit controls, Taiwan Realty Co (台灣房屋) said yesterday. “The data suggests that buying a home is growing increasingly difficult,” the brokers said, citing data from the Joint Credit Information Center (聯徵中心). The uptick in mortgage burdens came even though the central bank left its policy rates unchanged in the past two quarters and hiked the lenders’ required reserve ratios to drain money from the market, head researcher Charlene Chang (張旭嵐) said. Further, the
In a patch of South America rich in lithium, used to make batteries for electric cars and other tech, Bolivia is lagging its neighbors in the race to mine the key metal. An area called the “lithium triangle” which spills over the borders of Bolivia, Chile and Argentina is home to 60 percent of the world’s lithium reserves, according to the US Geological Survey. Bolivia claims to have Earth’s largest deposit of the metal, used to make rechargeable batteries for smartphones, laptops and other devices besides e-vehicles. However, Bolivia has undertaken only four pilot projects and is running just one
RSS