Forecasting the Chinese Yuan-US dollar exchange rate under the new Chinese exchange rate regime

Two models are specified, estimated, and used to generate out-of-sample forecasts over the period since China announced a shift in exchange rate policy from a simple peg to the US dollar to a basket peg. The results show that the model that is based on a crawling peg is far superior to the model that is based on a basket peg. It is also shown that trading the Chinese yuan versus the US dollar is more profitable than otherwise when trading is based on the assumption of a crawling peg, in which case buy and hold is the best strategy. It is concluded that China must be using a crawling peg, which is not good news for the US but may be good news for foreign exchange traders.