Free Republic

China said yesterday that it would allow a more flexible yuan, bringing to an end its controversial 23-month peg to the US dollar which has been accused of keeping Chinese exports artificially cheap. The People's Bank of China (PBOC) ruled out the one-off revaluation that US politicians had sought, arguing that there was "no basis for big fluctuations or changes". Instead, the yuan's 0.5pc daily trading band will remain unaltered, but the central bank will use a system of setting daily reference rates for the currency to slowly guide the exchange rate against the dollar higher. This is a similar...

While all eyes will be trained on the Chinese yuan in coming days, China's decision to drop its currency peg and allow its currency to gradually rise is likely cause bigger reverberations in the rest of Asia. Analysts are looking for big gains in currencies such as the South Korean won, Singapore dollar, Thai baht and Malaysian ringgit. The reason: they are proxies for China's growth and they're economic competitors which can now let their currencies rise as well. "It's possible the bigger currency moves will be in the rest of Asia, not in China," says Robert Subbaraman, economist for...

Danes have always loved the US as a travel destination. But with the dollar at its lowest point in 30 years, residents are now gobbling up the many discount offers being pitched by the nation's travel companies. Several travel bureaus are reporting increases of up to 140 percent on sales of trips to the states, where Danes can feel like wealthy plantation barons. In the past two years, the dollar has fallen from a value of 6.4 kroner to a shocking 4.8 kroner today - its lowest point since 1977. Weekend trips to New York City have been a hot...

All We Like Sheep January 1, 2004 Once upon a time, my father bought Time magazine every week, as I do now. He paid 20 cents per issue; I’m paying $3.95. In my teens I bought paperback editions of Shakespeare’s plays for 35 cents each; now they cost about five bucks. I’m no economist; these are just some of my rough indices of how prices have risen in my memory. Things in general now cost ten to twenty times as much as they used to. Don’t even ask about groceries or cars. If prices increased 1000 per cent overnight, we’d...