Vox Sentences: Why China is making its currency less valuable

Explaining the yuan's sharp drop; why the Watts riots still matter; and another presidential sex scandal (spoiler: the president is Harding).

Vox Sentences is written by Dylan Matthews and Dara Lind.

TOP NEWS

Is China sinking the yuan, or floating it?

Shanghai at night. (Eustaquio Santimano)

• Over the last week, the Chinese government has dropped the value of its currency, the yuan (or renminbi), by 4 percent.

  [New York Times / Neil Gough]

• You can look at this one of two ways. The first way to see it is that China's economy is struggling a lot, so the government — which sets the value of the currency — is deflating it a bit to boost exports of Chinese goods (and encourage people in China to buy domestic).

  [Macro and other Market Musings / David Beckworth]

• The second way to see it is that if China were like the US, or other countries that let the market set the value of currency, the yuan would already be worth less (in the same way that a badly-performing stock sinks in price). So China isn't forcing down the value of the yuan, it's just letting it get closer to where it would be without government direction.

  [Vox / Timothy Lee]

• China has promised that it's going to completely let go of currency controls at some point in the future. But before this week, the IMF said China was still doing too much. That matters because China's lobbying to get the yuan into a prestigious group of major currencies which the IMF manages.

  [Business Insider / Elena Holodny]

• So it's worth noting that the IMF, at least, sees this the second way: the government's moving toward letting go of the yuan, and the latest move is a reflection of what the market would've done if the currency floated.

  [Economist / S. R.]

• Yuan and renminbi are often used interchangeably, but the two mean slightly different things (yuan is used for discrete units, renminbi is nondiscrete).

  [BBC / Stephen Mulvey]

• The worst-case scenario: cheaper Chinese goods + higher US and European interest rates (which people expect to see later this year) = a worldwide "deflationary spiral."

  [Guardian / Heather Stewart]

• This is a very clear explanation from Paul Krugman about why deflation (prices going down across-the-board) is bad.

  [New York Times / Paul Krugman]

• The lesson here: there are many kinds of "currency manipulation." This is different from 2010, when China was pulling down the yuan even though its economy was growing at a healthy clip. So the "currency manipulation" concerns that some politicians aired then wouldn't make sense now.

  [Vox / Timothy Lee]

• If you're confused because you can't tell what the real value of the yuan or the dollar is from all this, remember: Money is a social construct that humans created to (presumably) make our lives easier.

  [New York Times / Paul Krugman]

Fifty years since the Watts riots

Police frisk a man during the Watts Riots in Los Angeles. (Express/Archive Photos/Getty)

• This week marks the 50th anniversary of the riots in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles, California.

  [Curbed LA / Adrian Glick Kudler]

• The Watts riots, which started when a mother confronted the police officer who'd pulled over her son, resulted in 34 deaths and over 1000 injuries; 4000 arrests; and an estimated $40 million in property damage. This is a good, straightforward account for those who are unfamiliar.

  [USC ]

• Watts holds outsized importance among the urban rebellions of the 1960s. It helped spark the white backlash that led to the war on crime and the rise of Nixon's "silent majority."

  [Vox / Dara Lind and Heather Ann Thompson]

• You can draw a direct line from the riots (and the LAPD's reaction to them) to the development of the SWAT team, and only a slightly-less-direct line to the general militarization of American policing. This passage from Radley Balko explains.

  [Rise of the Warrior Cop / Radley Balko]

• The Twitter account @WattsRiots50 is tweeting out developments in the riots as they unfolded in real time; it'll be active through Sunday the 17th.

  [@WattsRiots50 via Twitter]

• The LA Times' Doug Smith went back and reviewed some of the paper's coverage of the riots, pointing out exactly what the Times did wrong. I recommend it to anyone, but it's required reading for journalism geeks.

  [LA Times / Doug Smith]

• Most media outlets in 2015 aren't making the same mistakes. They're making different ones instead. If in 1965 journalists mentioned race too much, now they discuss it too little.

  [Vox / Jenee Desmond-Harris]

• Today, the Times reports that Watts is a majority-Latino neighborhood and some African-Americans feel pushed out.

  [New York Times / Jennifer Medina]

Warren Harding, accidental deadbeat dad

Universal History Archive/Getty Images

• Genetic testing has confirmed that President Warren G. Harding really was the father of a woman named Elizabeth Ann Blaesing. Blaesing's mother, Nan Britton, had claimed she had an affair with Harding starting when he was a Senator and continuing into the White House; his family denied it.

  [Vox / Margarita Noriega]

• This is somehow the second revelation about Warren Harding's sex life in as many years; in 2014, the Library of Congress unsealed a bunch of explicit letters Harding wrote to an earlier mistress.

  [New York Times / Jordan Michael Smith]

• Salaciousness aside, Blaesing's story is simply sad: Harding left no provision for her when he died, and his family denied her and her mother support.

  [Vox / Margarita Noriega]

• (Not that it can't also be traumatic to find out through genetic testing that you had a relative you didn't know about.)

  [Vox / George Doe]

• The new revelations don't address the rumors from the time that Harding was one-eighth African American (which, because it was the 1920s, was a smear). Historian Beverly Gage called the evidence for Harding's mixed-race ancestry "intriguing but not definitive."

  [New York Times / Beverly Gage]

• That makes his absolute barn-burner of a speech in Birmingham in 1921 on racial equality neither more nor less courageous: "When he called for economic equality, a thunder of applause came up from the segregated section [...] he departed from his prepared remarks to say: 'Whether you like it or not, unless our democracy is a lie, you must stand for that equality.'"

  [Birmingham History Center / Liz Ellaby]

• If the speech surprised you, you might be underrating Warren G. Harding, and you should read Dylan Matthews' defense of him.

  [Vox / Dylan Matthews]

MISCELLANEOUS

If you play your cards right, you can nearly double the size of your Chipotle burrito bowl just by ordering differently. [Apartment List / Dylan Grosz]

• One man is so convinced that the Berenstain bears were once the Berenstein bears that he's concocted a theory involving parallel universes to explain the situation.

  [AV Club / Caroline Siede]

• Here's where all your favorite TV production company closing logos came from.

  [Den of Geek / Louisa Mellor]

• Seth Meyers is getting rid of his late night show's opening monologue. It's about time.

  [Slate / Marissa Visci]

• Have you ever wanted to listen to mid-century German critical theorist Theodor Adorno's book Minima Moralia, performed as a series of hardcore punk songs? No? Too bad!

  [Open Culture / Josh Jones]

VERBATIM

"I have a theory that the easiest litmus test for privilege is how much contact someone’s had with poop that isn’t their own." [The Billfold / Rachel Ahrnsen]

• "He said that by raping me, he is drawing closer to God."

  [New York Times / Rukmini Callimachi]

• "Why are all those minions shaped like tiny phalluses? Why did Mad Max get top billing in Fury Road when he was essentially just a grunting tripod for Charlize Theron's rifle?"

  [Glamour / Stephen Colbert]

• "The star candidate of the 2015 Labour leadership contest, in what appears to be a momentary lapse in concentration, puts his hand into his trouser pocket, pulls out a £5 note, stares at it with a look of surprise that is neither excited nor disappointed, and puts it back."

  [The Independent / Jane Merrick]

• "While young Abram is best used as a prop in videos like "ULTIMATE BABY FAIL CAUGHT ON CAMERA!," "BABY GETS STUCK IN PUMPKIN!," and "BABY TERRIFIED OF TRAINS!," Symphony is old enough to participate in darker experiments. In "WHO DO YOU LOVE MORE … MOM OR DAD?," Sam and Nia won’t take "both" for an answer.

  [Slate / Amanda Hess]

WATCH THIS

Vox / Joss Fong

• Why Common Core math problems look so weird

  [YouTube / Joss Fong and Libby Nelson]

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