Selective Criteria: Who’s A “Currency Manipulator”?
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Taiwan, Thailand, Vietnam, and Switzerland all meet the U.S. government s criteria for being currency manipulators yet only two of those countries were officially labelled as such.
January 07, 2021
When the US Treasury Department declared Switzerland a “currency manipulator” last month, it raised some eyebrows. American officials rarely make such accusations publicly, and Switzerland, after all, is not an emerging economy looking for an edge in trade. Au contraire, the Swiss franc is one of the world’s safe-haven currencies. So, what’s going on?
“Currency manipulator” is a rare designation; Treasury has officially applied it only twice in the past 25 years: to China in 1994 and again in 2019. To earn the it, a country must meet three criteria, according to Treasury’s Foreign Exchange Report: 1) a trade surplus with the US that exceeds $20 billion over a 12-month period (Switzerland’s surplus