China shocks the carry traders

The Chinese central bank has whipped the rug from under the yuan - and the markets.

The Chinese currency, the renminbi, or yuan, has seen its biggest five-day slide against the US dollar since 1994. It has fallen by 1% since the middle of last week, and on Tuesday posted a record decline of 0.4% against the greenback.

This is only the second major pullback in the dollar-yuan rate since 2005, when the government scrapped a peg against the dollar and began allowing the currency to appreciate very gradually, using a tightly controlled daily trading band.

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Andrew Van Sickle
Editor, MoneyWeek

Andrew is the editor of MoneyWeek magazine. He grew up in Vienna and studied at the University of St Andrews, where he gained a first-class MA in geography & international relations.

After graduating he began to contribute to the foreign page of The Week and soon afterwards joined MoneyWeek at its inception in October 2000. He helped Merryn Somerset Webb establish it as Britain’s best-selling financial magazine, contributing to every section of the publication and specialising in macroeconomics and stockmarkets, before going part-time.

His freelance projects have included a 2009 relaunch of The Pharma Letter, where he covered corporate news and political developments in the German pharmaceuticals market for two years, and a multiyear stint as deputy editor of the Barclays account at Redwood, a marketing agency.

Andrew has been editing MoneyWeek since 2018, and continues to specialise in investment and news in German-speaking countries owing to his fluent command of the language.