Topic: Chinese Yuan

A debt crisis in the euro zone has sparked risk aversion, driving the dollar index to its highest since September 2010, and casting doubt on whether Beijing can afford to let the yuan to continue to strengthen against the dollar.

The World Bank cut its economic growth forecast for China this year to 8.2 percent on Wednesday and urged the country to rely on easier fiscal policy that boosts consumption rather than state investment to lift activity.

Iran is accepting renminbi for some of the crude oil it supplies to China, industry executives in Beijing and Kuwait and Dubai-based bankers said, partly as a consequence of U.S. sanctions aimed at limiting Tehran’s nuclear program, the Financial Times reports.

The U.S. fixation on China's currency is "old" and it is time the debate moved on to more important issues such as trade and market access, said Stephen Roach, the former Non-Executive Chairman of Morgan Stanley Asia.

U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said China is strong enough to handle the economic and financial reforms that the United States seeks.

To foreign bondholders of Fosun International, concerns seem to be growing around the business prospects of the Chinese industrial conglomerate.

HSBC is launching its first offshore yuan bond, which will be the first offshore yuan deal to be listed in London, IFR, a Thomson Reuters publication, reported on Wednesday.

Investments in Europe could come to total more than 20 percent of China's sovereign wealth fund’s diversified equities, according to Jin Liqun, chairman of the Board of Supervisors at the fund.

China’s weekend decision to widen its currency’s trading band has sparked a debate on where the next yuan offshore trading center will be located. While Hong Kong holds the lead for the amount of international trade settled in yuan, other financial centers like Singapore and London are competing to be crowned the next yuan offshore hub.

The Chinese central bank’s move to double the dollar-yuan daily trading band to one percent is merely a response to pressure from the U.S and will not lead to faster appreciation of the currency in the coming months, independent economist Andy Xie, said Monday.

The yuan displayed greater volatility on Monday but steered clear of testing a newly expanded trading band, suggesting investors were comfortable with the current range as Beijing tries to guide the economy through a controlled cooldown. 

Temasek Holdings has agreed to buy $2.3 billion worth of shares in China's Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, the Singapore state investor said on Monday, giving it a 5.3 percent stake in the world's largest bank by market value.

China's widening of the yuan's trading band will do little to blunt criticism of its currency policy by the United States and the Treasury Department said on Sunday more progress was needed to correct a "misalignment" of the exchange rate.

China's weekend reform of its currency regime nails shut the coffin on the last remains of doubt about whether the world's second biggest economy has successfully steered a course past a hard economic landing.

China took a milestone step in turning the yuan into a global currency on Saturday by doubling the size of its trading band against the dollar, pushing through a crucial reform that further liberalizes its nascent financial markets.