The renminbi’s sharp fall over the past week started after regulators told traders they were relaxing informal foreign exchange trading limits, according to people familiar with the matter.
The State Administration of Foreign Exchange frequently uses informal “window guidance” to manage the exchange rate, sometimes discouraging participation in renminbi-dollar trading in order to slow depreciation of the Chinese currency.
But two people familiar with the matter said SAFE officials privately communicated a relaxation of the informal limits on transactions in China’s interbank market to foreign exchange brokers on Wednesday last week, in the wake of the Fed’s interest rate rise of 0.75 percentage points.