Lot of good discussion from @Brad_Setser @PMehrling @michaelxpettis @adam_tooze on a recent @TheEconomist article on the rise of the $rmb as a reserve currency. At Exante we track this closely. We have seen modest CB purchases of RMB driven mostly by the SNB in early 2020... 1/5 
...but COFER data, which is a much broader sample than the reserve managers tracked above, shows net RMB sales by reserve managers in Q4. The first quarter of sales since joining the SDR... 2/5
...overall the RMB share of global reserves has been flat since about mid-2018 at 2.6% (excluding Chinese reserves from the global total)... 3/5
...And the sharp rise in 2018 with a more than $50bn estimated flow to RMB in Q2 2018 (see above) basically reflected Russian diversification... 4/5
...However, in contrast to the rest of EM March and April did see decent overall foreign inflows to Chinese bonds (~CNY50bn) while most EMs saw very large foreign sales of local debt... 5/5
