All time world record powerlifter, medical researcher: SARS-CoV-2, endocrinology, biochemistry, sports pharmacology, technologist, music producer, RIA Biz
Amazing experience playing for Wisconsin District Midwinter South 2025! Here’s a clip from last Thursday evening’s service (Jan 30).
Always a pleasure to share the stage with the abundantly talented Section 2 crew!
Food for thought.
China wants to Gets Tough? Then Float the Yuan and Open the Capital Account
China’s new order telling firms to ignore U.S. sanctions sounds like a strategic turning point, but it’s really a loud flourish on top of a deeply cautious financial regime. Beijing is willing to manufacture a legal clash with Washington over a handful of refiners and Iran oil flows, but it is absolutely unwilling to take the one step that would prove real confidence: floating the yuan and lifting capital controls. That gap between swagger and structure is the story.
On the surface, China is “playing tough” by declaring U.S. sanctions illegitimate and instructing its companies to treat American law as a foreign nuisance. Beneath the surface, the system still rests on a tightly managed exchange rate, strict controls on cross‑border flows, and a party‑directed banking sector designed to contain panic and suppress market verdicts. True monetary sovereignty, exposing the currency and capital account to global discipline, would mean accepting the risk of sudden stops, capital flight, and a genuine market price for Chinese risk. That is a step Xi’s China will not take.
The result is an asymmetry: Beijing talks like a revisionist power but behaves, in monetary terms, like a highly defensive one. It is not building an open alternative to the dollar system; it is building a walled‑off subsystem that can route around U.S. pressure in specific corridors while keeping domestic savers and capital locked inside. That combination, muscular rhetoric at the frontier, financial caution at home, is precisely why U.S. sanctions are being eroded at the edges instead of being confronted head‑on, and why the contest over financial hegemony will be a grinding, structural competition rather than a single decisive break.