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Comment by devoply | Hacker News Reader

Yes considering the US prints hand over fists amounts of money to deal with its economic woes, it's sort of a joke where the emperor wears no clothes, but no one says anything because he's the emperor.

https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/090915/quant...

> "In theory, currency manipulation and a monetary policy like quantitative easing aren't the same thing. One is interest rate policy based and the other currency focused. However, as central banks began their QE programs, one result was the weakening of its currency.

> Intentional or not, it can be argued that QE is, in some way, a form of currency engineering. Whether its manipulation that will always be up for debate."

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The USD has risen against pretty much every major currency in the past several years. Its status as the world reserve currency keeps its value artificially high despite running the printing press.

Whether this is good or bad for the US economy is debatable (and unclear), but it's not really a recipe for currency manipulation at all. I have no idea what you're talking about.

is it really debatable? how could giving China printed paper for their goods be bad for US economy?

I don’t understand this argument. Can’t the Chinese buy a LOT of influence, real estate, and US properties with all the dollars? Why is printing money “free”? How is this not either hyperinflation on one end or just regular currency value on the other. On one end it hurts the issuing country, on the other it’s mutually beneficial. How does printed-paper for goods fit into that spectrum.

I truly can’t wrap my head around this argument: been on the back of my head since I heard I think Peter Thiel say it (iirc.)

> The USD has risen against pretty much every major currency in the past several years.

And would have risen more without QE.

> And would have risen more without QE.

And risen even more than that if they had started destroying currency. But the usual target for a currency is value stability with other major currencies, and "devaluation" means that its value goes down compared to most other currencies.

It's completely normal (and basically required to prevent deflation) to create some new currency during normal (i.e. growth) times to provide more currency to use for the increasing number of transactions.

Well, America’s QE caused everyone else to do QE as well. The RMB because stronger in that period because China was less interested in doing QE at the time.

Printing alone is not manipulation.

Now, if the US were to print a quadrillion USD, and then flood the Yuan-USD market with printed USDs...

That's the funny part to me. Currencies don't exist in a vacuum. There's no way NOT to manipulate your own currency. Even in countries that don't directly control monetary policy can still change the value of their currencies indirectly (via taxes for example).

Currencies do exist in a vacuum. Which is why currency manipulation is international and national fraud; your laborers and trading partners lose. It's also why we have a purchasing power parity.

Managing a currency through the control of interest rates, taxes, employment etc. are the legal ways of the game to manipulate your currency.

Centralized clandestine devaluation of ones currency while government sponsored companies buy real estate worth trillions all over the world, as well as commodities and rare resources, not to mention the jobs it's created and among local populations and the access to foreign citizens data, is an outright slap in the face to any sort of partnership.

There is a spectrum from the likes of Venezuela and previously Zimbabwe (who manipulated currency at will and let’s say Gold on the other hand. Manipulator depends on how far down the spectrum you operate in compared to others.

Bush intentionally weakened the dollar in 2001 to boost export sales. Nobody batted an eye then.

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