"The crisis has been the trigger for the
Chinese economy to move to a more traditional model of growth," IMF
Managing Director Dominique Strauss-Kahn said during a lecture in
Johannesburg.
"What
goes with this kind of policy is a revaluation of the Chinese
currency," he said. "We may get changes in the coming months."
The yuan has been locked
in place against the dollar for nearly two years, as Beijing has
effectively re-pegged its exchange rate to buffer China's economy
against the ravages of the global financial crisis.
Strauss-Kahn also
described increased savings rates by American households since the
financial crisis as a "huge change in the global economy" that would
start to address the structural imbalances between Asia and the United
States.
However, he
said the Chinese and other emerging market consumers were still a long
way off being the engine of world growth to replace the United States.
"You are not going to replace the American
consumer with the Asian consumer just in a few weeks," he said. "You
don't change the route of a big ship like this one overnight."
As a result, the world
economy was now in uncharted territory, he said.
"We're not going back to
business as usual," he said. "The growth model of the global economy is
basically unknown."