US Department of Treasury removes India from its Currency Monitoring List

The US on Friday removed India along with four other countries from its Currency Monitoring List.

The US Department of Treasury, in its biannual report to the Congress, said that India, Italy, Mexico, Thailand and Vietnam have been removed from the list.

The countries that have been removed from the list have met only one out of three criteria for two consecutive reports, it said.

China, Japan, Korea, Germany, Malaysia, Singapore, and Taiwan are the seven economies that are a part of the current monitoring list.

“China’s failure to publish foreign exchange intervention and broader lack of transparency around key features of its exchange rate mechanism makes it an outlier among major economies and warrants Treasury’s close monitoring,” said the report.

The US treasury department had placed India on a watchlist of currency manipulators in June this year on account of its significant bilateral trade surplus.

This was the third time since the start of the pandemic that India figured on the list.

The US treasury department puts a trading partner on the watchlist if that country had intervened in the currency market by higher levels than 2% of its GDP over a 12-month period, and had a current account surplus of 2% of GDP and a trade surplus with the US.