It has become conventional wisdom among many prominent economists, bankers, and politicians that the Chinese currency is on a path that will inevitably make it a global reserve currency to rival the US dollar.
So great is the excitement around the future international role of the renminbi that George Osborne, UK chancellor, in January launched an initiative to help London become a global hub for renminbi foreign exchange trading.
Writing in the Financial Times last September, Arvind Subramanian, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics – in an article titled “Coming soon: when the renminbi rules the world” – declared: “internationalising the renminbi has been set in irreversible motion”.