Friday, May 1, 2020

Yuan Crashes After Trump Weighs Blocking Retirement Fund Access To Chinese Stocks As War Of Words Escalates

Trump made his initial threats from the Rose Garden at the White House Monday after he was pressed by a reporter over a German newspaper report suggesting that China should be issued a $160 billion invoice for the impact on Europe's economy.

"We have ways of doing things a lot easier than that," Trump told the coronavirus press briefing.

"We haven't determined the final amount yet. It's very substantial," Trump added, suggesting it would be significantly more than the $160 billion floated in German media.

Since then various plans have been proposed, but Trump escalated the war of words further, during an Oval Office interview with Reuters published Wednesday night, saying that he thinks that China is determined to see him lose the November election based on Beijing's response to the coronavirus, and that he is considering various ways to punish the Chinese government which he he again blamed for allowing the virus to spread across the world.

"China will do anything they can to have me lose this race," Trump said in the interview and said he was looking at different options in terms of consequences for Beijing over the virus.

Tonight, Bloomberg reports that, after months of pressure from concerned lawmakers, according to a person familiar with the internal deliberations, the Trump admin is planning an executive order to block a 2017 decision that The Thrift Savings Plan, the federal government's retirement savings fund, would transfer a massive $50 billion to an international fund which would mirror the MSCI All-Country World Index.

The issue being China's addition to the index, and thus the fund being forced to allocate significant capital to the Chinese stock markets, at a time when the gloves between the two nations are clearly off.

https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/yuan-crashes-after-trump-weighs-blocking-retirement-fund-access-chinese-stocks-war-words

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