alt Hacker NewsPaying Chinese companies in RMB isn’t the issue. If I sell something and a Chinese company pays me in RMB, I can’t really do anything with a billion yuan. Can’t buy a company (limitations on foreign ownership), can’t buy property (99-year lease that can be canceled on the whims of the government at any time), can’t buy Chinese debt (terrible yields, very small foreign market access, incredibly opaque laws and accounting), and nobody else in the world wants it so I have no choice but to sell it back to China in exchange for a real currency at whatever horseshit exchange rate they’ve concocted.
It’s worthless money and I don’t see anything out of china that would cause that to change.
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> Can’t buy a company (limitations on foreign ownership)
This is quickly going away[1].
[1] https://www.nortonrosefulbright.com/en/knowledge/publication...
I guess this is naive, but can't you use it to buy (or sell it to people who want to buy) Chinese products? It's not like China doesn't have an enormous amount and range of products on offer.
Thats a feature not a bug.
The Chinese government spend a lot of money keeping the value of the RMB low.
I mean, you can buy goods and services within china, and you can sell those goods and services. The “horseshit” exchange rate can’t deviate too far from the real value or it incentivises laundering too much. The exchange rate isn’t _that_ bad as a result.
What about buying rare earth metals or containers of electronics or purses? It's a bit more work, but it's not impossible to solve the problem.
Also, it's not like a 99-year lease has no value. That's your entire lifetime+.