Anthony Rayner: Are currency wars a natural progression from trade wars?

In response to recent US announcement on new tariffs, the Chinese authorities allowed the renminbi to weaken above the symbolic 7, versus the US dollar. In turn, this led the US to label the Chinese as currency manipulators. These exchanges might sound like straightforward tit-for-tat but they do appear to raise the ante, which might mean some investors are too complacent. Cast your mind back to the beginning of 2018, when the dominant narrative was that there would not be a fully-fledged trade war - the conventional wisdom being that the authorities had learnt from past experience that ...