A leading Chinese financial official on Monday rejected suggestions the US dollar could be replaced quickly as the global reserve currency, as US Treasury secretary Tim Geithner arrived in China on his first official visit.
    “In the short term I don’t think we can find another currency to replace the US dollar,” said Guo Shuqing, chairman of China Construction Bank and former head of the country’s foreign exchange administrator. “The US dollar is the main currency because their economy is number one in terms of competitiveness, in terms of innovation.” Speaking in an interview with the Financial Times, Mr Guo also raised doubts about a proposal from China’s central bank governor, Zhou Xiaochuan, to replace the dollar with a “super-sovereign reserve currency” based on special drawing rights issued by the International Monetary Fund.
    “We’ve had SDRs for many years but everybody knows they don’t work so well,” said Mr Guo. “People worry about US dollars very much because of the imbalances in the current account but that has been the case for many years – they have had a deficit in the current account since the very beginning of the 1970s.”
    The bulk of China’s total international investment position is held in US dollar assets and only 6 per cent is in the form of direct investment.
    Fears that US moves to tackle the recession could undermine the value of the dollar have led to calls from senior Chinese officials, including Mr Zhou, for more conservative fiscal policy and suggestions that the dollar be replaced as the world’s reserve currency.
    On his arrival in Beijing on Monday, Mr Geithner called for China to make its currency more flexible in return for fiscal reforms on the part of the US.
    In remarks to an audience at Peking University that set the tone for two days of talks with Chinese leaders, Mr Geithner reiterated President Barack Obama’s pledge to lower the US fiscal deficit to about 3 per cent of GDP once the economy was on a stable recovery path.
    But Mr Geithner also named a long list of tasks the Chinese government had to address to make its contribution to a more balanced global economy.
    These included expanding its social safety net, spending more on education and encouraging changes in industry structure through market mechanisms.
    China has in the past protested when the US put it under pressure to allow its currency to appreciate.
    The US dollar fell to its lowest since mid-December on Monday against a basket of currencies and against the euro.