The People’s Bank of China’s Governor Yi Gang met with US Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell in Washington this week for their first one-on-one talk since 2020.
(Bloomberg) — The People’s Bank of China’s Governor Yi Gang met with US Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell in Washington this week for their first one-on-one talk since 2020.
Yi and Powell discussed the economic and financial situation in the world’s two largest economies during their meeting on Tuesday, according to a statement released Friday by the PBOC, which doesn’t provide more detail. The talk was held during the World Bank and International Monetary Fund’s Spring Meetings.
The last publicly known conversation between the pair took place on March 2, 2020, when Powell spoke for 17 minutes with Yi over the phone. That was one of a flurry of calls Powell made one day ahead of the Fed’s emergency interest rate cut in an initial response to shield the US economy against the spreading coronavirus.
Before this week, Yi’s last in-person meeting with Powell was in 2019, also in Washington on the sidelines of IMF and World Bank meetings.
For much of the past few years, China imposed strict border restrictions and quarantine requirements for international travelers to contain the spread of Covid, finally ending those curbs early this year. Yi and other Chinese officials attended international meetings mostly via video links during that period.
Yi met with US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen last November on the sidelines of a Group of 20 summit in Indonesia. The two exchanged views on the economic outlooks for China and the US in that meeting, which lasted more than two hours.
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