Making room for the yuan

From today’s Wall Street Journal comes word that France and China are forming a task force to discuss including the yuan in the basket of currencies that form the IMF’s Special Drawing Rights: China and France have agreed to form a task force to discuss the conditions for and the form in which the yuan ...

By , a professor at Indiana University’s Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies.

From today's Wall Street Journal comes word that France and China are forming a task force to discuss including the yuan in the basket of currencies that form the IMF's Special Drawing Rights:

From today’s Wall Street Journal comes word that France and China are forming a task force to discuss including the yuan in the basket of currencies that form the IMF’s Special Drawing Rights:

China and France have agreed to form a task force to discuss the conditions for and the form in which the yuan could become part of the International Monetary Fund’s special drawing rights, French Finance Minister Francois Baroin said Friday after meetings with Chinese officials.

The group will make a proposal ahead of a summit of leaders of the Group of 20 nations in the French city of Cannes in November, he said.

The move comes as China moves slowly toward allowing greater international use of its currency and eventually opening its capital account. The SDR is a synthetic currency composed of four major currencies, the euro, the U.S. dollar, the pound, and the yen.

In the past, China has indicated its desire to have the yuan included by 2015 and to see a much greater role for SDRs.

David Bosco is a professor at Indiana University’s Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies. He is the author of The Poseidon Project: The Struggle to Govern the World’s Oceans. Twitter: @multilateralist

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