For those with negative personality. It's you against you, full stop. http://www.amazon.com/How-Get-Your-Step-Step/dp/188655417X
Let me get this straight... you (an ET assclown who can't admit he's wrong) are saying to believe you over the Federal Reserve? And Paul Tudor Jones who's traded foreign exchange for 30 years and is worth $3 billion is somehow foolish enough to put this "obviously wrong" information in his investment letter... but you know better? LMAO!!!!
So Tudor Jones blames China for the unemployment and advocates a 30% revaluation of RMB, which would instantaneously slice Americans' wealth by a third. Ok, when you're done drinking Kool-aid, take a look at this interview which lays out real reasons for unemployment http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4PQrz8F0dBI
Please, do yourself a favor. Don't lower yourself into a thug if you are not one already. The fed research paper already showed that there was no such thing as "50% devaluation on Jan 1, 1994". Instead, it claimed that there was, maybe, or, possible, a 40% decline in the black markt exchange rate in the two years prior to 1994. Again, there was no reference, no sources mentioned in that article. Given the nature of the black exchange rate market, I have no idea how the authors got the data. I asked my Chinese friend about whether there was any hard evidence about the black market exchange rate from 1988-1994. He suguested that I go to a oversea Chinese forum and post a question there. I did what he suggested. So far I got only one reply: 1 US dollar = 8.2 RMB, which is close to what my friend told me and what I remembered from my visits. I will post more if I get more replies. (If you want to know which website I posted the question, send me a pm).
You guys reminded me I needed to get off my lazy ass and actually ask someone about this. Which I did, and he remembers more or less the same thing, a drop from about 8.5 to 8.3, close enough to 8.2 given that he wouldn't have remembered the exact rate so many years later, and then steady for many years after that. So, once again more evidence that this devaluation wasn't all that great. But I also found a paper online that talked about three different rates prior to 1994. I'll post that with some comments later.
So now you're lying? On January 1, 1994, the Chinese government unified its exchange rate system by abolishing the official rate. Overnight the market value of China's currency fell by 50%. http://www.frbsf.org/econrsrch/wklyltr/wklyltr98/el98-01.html And who gives a crap about what your Chinese friend says? If you even have one. Grow up. China does not intend to promote exports by the depreciation of (its) currency [6]. It would have been more correct to say that it no longer does so, since that is what it had done since January 1, 1994, when the Chinese currency was devalued in real terms by about 55%. http://www.asianews.it/news-en/Chinese-yuan-set-to-replace-dollar-14131.html
You'd better re-read the paper and the posts of mine and trefoil's. It should not be too difficult to figure out.
trefoil: thanks for digging this out. Given that this was the black market rate, a change from 8.5 to 8.3 is not a big event.
OK, I have the paper. First of all, I have to agree with the earlier guy that this thread has been highly informative. Trader666 is a bit rambunctious, and he tends towards black/white with no shades of gray, but that doesn't mean he doesn't have a point, and finding that FRB paper was an excellent bit of research. The paper in question is: The Economic Impact of the Chinese Yuan Revaluation, and the paragraph that talks about the three exchange rates is here (this will look a bit strange as it comes off a PDF): I've italicized the last sentence because it suggests that the FRB may not have been as far off as you think. As the rate exporters charged was, as this researcher says earlier, a weighted average of official and unofficial rates, that means the rate prior to the revaluation would have been higher than after, when all three, the market, swap, and official rates, were unified. That being the case, there would have been a sudden drop in the price of exported Chinese goods from that date forward. Thus, the FRB would not have been too far off in suggesting that this devaluation was at the least a contributing cause in the later Asian currency crisis.