Sean Callow, an analyst at Westpac, thinks that the U.S. Treasury’s announcement of China to be a currency manipulator is likely to make little difference, given how far the U.S.-China trade tensions have already escalated.

• “In terms of how Treasury reached the manipulator designation, its own report in May 2019 concluded that China only met one of the three criteria – a very large bilateral goods surplus with the US. Its current account surplus was not above 2% of GDP and the US conceded that China has not been engaging in persistent intervention to weaken the yuan.”