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Meanwhile I know people in China who are very desperate to get their hands on USD, CAD, EUR, GBP etc.
Anedoctal evidence I know but I have a friend who has strained relations with his relatives in China because he refused to launder if you would call it that money. I think each person has a limit on the amount of money transferred.
I mean these people have never left China, why the hell do they need USD. Make what you wish but until the yuan becomes attractive to their own people other currencies are of no threat.
Because there are limits to how much money you can take out of China, and whenever there’s a limit there’s people trying to circumvent them? It’s not rocket science.
Yes but that doesn’t explain why they would need USD. For example I’ve only exchanged USD once and that was because I was going to a country where it was the legal tender.
I didn’t exchange my life savings for it, 50,000 a year limit is high for someone who hasn’t left China. I haven’t even exchanged 10,000 in my lifetime let alone 50,000. I just keep it in AUD, USD is useless here.
So it points to me that they don’t trust their currency which is what I’m getting at. A currency needs to be trusted by the countries people itself before it can be a threat to any of the established currencies.
Purchase of foreign property, usually.
Again not sure what foreign property would do for them when they haven’t left China and have no plans to do so. They’re almost at retirement age so if they haven’t made any plans…
So the other half of this story was they went around to all their relatives who are based overseas and got them to “store” converted currency in GBP, USD, CAD etc. If it was me I would be converting to the place I’m interested in residing not just anything I can get my hands on.
The other relatives weren’t smart enough or was too under pressure to say no. Also someone storing currency in your name rather than their own even as a relative causes tax issues at the very minimum and other issues if the money has come from a non legitimate means (I’m not inferring this is what happened just saying the worst case scenario on why you shouldn’t deposit money from someone else)
It’s almost always investment/for children’s education/etc.