Bloomberg Provided the Wrong Reasons Why Taiwan was on the Monitoring List of the U.S. Treasury

In the Bloomberg’s report published on January 29, 2021, it stated “The Taiwan dollar strengthened …, triggering ongoing interventions …. The U.S. responded by putting Taiwan back onto its watch list of potential currency manipulators in December and urging its central bank to allow the local dollar to appreciate further…” which is contrary to the truth . The Bank would like to provide clarification as follows, 

1. Last December U.S. Treasury FX Report put Taiwan on the Monitoring List only to reflect that Taiwan met two of the three criteria in the Report, which includes bilateral trade surplus with the U.S. above US$20 billion and current account surplus to GDP ratio in excess of 2 percent. And it apparently has nothing do with the Bank’s intervention in the forex market.

2. The aforementioned Report did not contain statement about U.S. Treasury has urged our Bank to allow the local dollar to appreciate further.

3. The US Customs recorded widened goods trade deficit with Taiwan in recent years. This mainly reflected orders diverted to Taiwan because of the US-China trade and technology conflicts, the enhanced safety standards on information-related products set by the U.S., and the “stay-at-home” economy caused by the COVID-19 pandemic induced the US consumers to demand much more of Taiwan’s information/communication/audio-video products.