Dollar dips on Geithner’s ‘loose talk’

By Krishna Guha and Tom Braithwaite in Washington and Peter Garnham in London

Published: March 25 2009 14:19 | Last updated: March 26 2009 01:14

The dollar fell briefly on Wednesday after Tim Geithner, the Treasury secretary, appeared to suggest that the US was open to exploring a Chinese proposal to reduce reliance on the dollar as the world’s reserve currency.

Mr Geithner told the Council for Foreign Relations that he had not studied the proposal by Zhou Xiaochuan, Chinese central bank governor, for greater use of special drawing rights – a synthetic currency maintained by the International Monetary Fund that represents a basket of actual currencies – in global reserves, but added: “We are quite open to that.â€