So China has been granted the ambition it has harboured explicitly for its currency for the best part of five years: to be included in the International Monetary Fund's Special Drawing Rights, the basket of "elite" currencies that constitute part of numerous central banks' foreign exchange reserves. From October 1 next year, the renminbi will stand alongside the dollar, the euro, the British pound and the Japanese yen in the synthetic IMF currency. IMF head Christine Lagarde announced the move in an exchange with journalists that contained both tired old platitudes towards China and a curiously unconfident use of professional finance-speak. Well, as the old saying goes, be careful what you wish for. That goes both for China and for the US-led bloc of Bretton-Woods legacy institutions of which the IMF forms arguably the most crucial core.
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