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July 23, 2026 - 22:27
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(Bloomberg) — China stands out among US trading partners for its “relative lack of transparency” around currency management, the Treasury Department said in a semiannual foreign-exchange report released Thursday.The US left its “monitoring list” for foreign-exchange practices unchanged, with 10 countries listed, and stopped short of labeling any major trade partner as a currency manipulator.Trading partners that meet two of three criteria under a 2015 law get assigned to a list of economies that merit close monitoring by the Treasury for their exchange-rate practices.While a bipartisan duo of US senators recently called for the Treasury to consider a “formal finding of manipulation” by China, the report stopped short of that. But it warned that China could be designated a manipulator “if available evidence suggests that it is intervening through formal or informal channels to resist RMB appreciation in the future.”Rick Scott, a Florida Republican, and Elizabeth Warren, a Massachusetts Democrat, in a June 17 letter to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent urged him to coordinate with the Group of Seven in pressuring China over “deliberately suppressing the value of its currency.”The dollar slumped sharply in the first half of last year amid concern about President Donald Trump’s steep tariff hikes and the impact they’d have on foreign appetite for American assets as well as the outlook for US growth. The greenback has since stabilized, buoyed by a resilient US economy and still-elevated inflation, which has fueled bets the Federal Reserve will increase interest rates later this year.A number of US trading partners’ currencies have come under pressure in recent months, including the yen. Japanese authorities appear to have sold US Treasuries in their efforts to intervene in the foreign-exchange market and prop up their currency, data showed June 5.India has also taken a raft of measures to support the rupee. South Korea’s won in early June slid to the lowest level since 2009 even as the government pledged to curb excess volatility.By contrast, China — which has seen its trade surplus hit record highs in recent quarters — has been moving to restrain appreciation in the yuan, analysts say. The nation’s state-owned banks had been “aggressively intervening” to slow gains in the yuan, Barclays Plc strategists said in May.–With assistance from Daniel Flatley and Greg Ritchie.©2026 Bloomberg L.P.
