Ch 8 Response

From my perspective, it has always been difficult to wrap my brain around the valuing of money. I don't understand currency exchange all too well and Dodson only confused me further in this chapter. Through Dodson's writing, I felt like I was being thrown too many facts with too little explanation. Dodson assumed that the reader knew more about money previously than I actually did. So, it was a little difficult to get through. From what I gathered in the chapter, the value of the yuan is increasing to the US dollar, but it is still greatly undervalued. The Chinese seem to want to maintain an undervalue of their currency for the sake of keeping low labor costs with a surplus of work. The chapter also mentioned the value of the yuan in correlation to when China would peg its currency to the American dollar, but it was never defined what this actually meant. In continuing on in the chapter, this made the reading more confusing because I never had a firm grasp on what it meant for China to peg the yuan to the dollar. Also, Dodson compared American and Chinese currency multiple times throughout the reading; yet, in many cases he stated facts but he never stated whether these values were horribly good or bad. In particular, the section about China's holdings in foreign reserves. He stated that there was a vast difference in the two values and named them, but never explained which country was in better standing. Because I didn't really understand what it meant by "holdings in foreign reserves," I was even more lost at what these values were pointing out. 
Haley Martin