Three of the world's leading economic powers, China, Japan and the US, are taking advantage of their weak currencies to spur exports and finance deficits.
"The Chinese growth strategy is based on an under-valued currency," said Evariste Lefeuvre, an economist at investment bank Ixis-CIB.
The US and the EU for the last three years have pressed China to allow its currency, the yuan, to appreciate. Chinese authorities have pledged to take action but on their own terms.
"China does not yet have the currency policy that we want it to have and that it needs," US Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson told a US Senate committee last week.
Reporting back on high-level talks held in Beijing a month ago, Paulson warned: "The international community will run out of patience with China unless the pace of its reform accelerates."
China stands accused of massaging its exchange rate to depress the yuan's value and so boost the razor-sharp competitiveness of its exports, at the expense of US jobs.
Paulson said that while he welcomed promises of reform made at the December launch in Beijing of a new Sino-US "strategic economic dialogue," he stressed that "we need to see much more."
The Japanese yen meanwhile has fallen sharply against both the dollar and the euro in the last two weeks and is likely to be at the top of the agenda when finance ministers from the G7 -- Britain, Canada, France, Germany. Italy, Japan and the US -- gather in Essen, Germany on Friday and Saturday this week.
A recent decision by the Bank of Japan to leave its key interest rate unchanged at 0.25 percent, despite a Japanese economic recovery, irked EU authorities who suspect Tokyo of manipulating its currency.
For Agnes Benassy-Quere, head of the economic and political research group CEPII, the weakness of the yen is more likely attributable to near-non-existent inflation in Japan and a still fragile economic rebound.
David Solin, an economist with FX Analytics, said the Bank of Japan, while insisting that it does not intervene on currency markets, nonetheless sends a clear signal by delaying a move to tighten monetary policy and lets it be known that any tightening would be limited.
It will take a strong signal from the bank that an actual tightening cycle was about to begin for the yen to appreciate, he added.
The dollar too has been under pressure for several years now, having lost more than a third of its value against the euro since 2002, largely as a result of Washington's gaping current account and trade deficits.
US authorities routinely assert that a strong dollar is in Washington's best interests, but -- in the view of many economists -- they do little to talk up the greenback, since its weakness is a boon to US exports.
Veronique Riches-Flores, the chief economist at Societe Generale, described a weak US dollar as a "temptation," notably as a means of spurring export-driven employment.
In the eurozone, she said, the rise of the single currency against the dollar, the yuan and the yen, "has lowered export earnings by 15 to 20 percent" in the last five years.
But other economists have mininised the impact of the appreciating euro on eurozone sales abroad, pointing to the health of the German export sector.
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