Christopher Kent: Remarks at the Australian Renminbi Forum Melbourne

Address by Mr Christopher Kent, Assistant Governor (Financial Markets) of the Reserve Bank of Australia, to the Australian Renminbi Forum, Melbourne, 12 June 2019.

The views expressed in this speech are those of the speaker and not the view of the BIS.

Introduction

Thank you to the Australian Renminbi Working Group for the invitation to offer some remarks this morning.

Over time, the Chinese authorities have gradually opened up China's capital account. Among many other things, this has encouraged deeper financial links between Australia and China, supported by strong trade ties. There is scope for these links to deepen further. One way to see this is to look at cross-border investment in debt and equity markets. Both inflows and outflows are shown. For China, this measure of cross-border investment remains small relative to advanced economies and to other emerging markets in Asia.

Given the focus of today's discussions, I thought it would be helpful to briefly summarise how financial links between Australia and China have evolved over the past decade or so. Increased financial connections have not only revealed themselves by way of a rise in bilateral investment but, of particular interest to this audience, we have also observed a rise in the use of the renminbi by businesses in Australia.