The Treasury Department officially declared Friday that none of the countries that the U.S. trades with is artificially manipulating its currency.
“Based on the analysis in this report, Treasury also concludes that no major trading partner of the United States met the standards identified in Section 3004 of the Omnibus Trade and Competitiveness Act of 1988 for currency manipulation in the second half of 2016,” the department said in a statement.
The department added that six major trading partners — China, Germany, Japan, Korea, Switzerland and Taiwan — merited being placed on “monitoring list.”
“Expanding trade in a way that is freer and fairer for all Americans requires that other economies avoid unfair currency practices, and we will continue to monitor this carefully,” said Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin.
President Trump this week said that China would not be labeled a currency manipulator despite repeated campaign pledges to do so on the first day in the White House. He said that the country has not been manipulating its currency for several months and that labeling it a manipulator would hurt the U.S. negotiations with China over North Korea.
That’s a stark reversal from what Trump said during the president campaign and for a long while afterward. “I mean, look, we’re being hurt very badly by China with devaluation,” Trump told “Fox News Sunday” in December. He also criticized Japan repeatedly on the campaign trail and afterward for manipulation.
“You look at what China’s doing, you look at what Japan has done over the years,” he said in a meeting with the drug industry soon after he was inaugurated. “They play the money market, they play the devaluation market and we sit there like a bunch of dummies.”
