China's central bank has held the line on its yuan for a fourth straight session while putting the squeeze on offshore sellers of the currency, dampening fears of a sustained depreciation - at least for now.
Investors globally seemed to welcome the stabilisation, bidding up equities and yuan proxies such as the Australian dollar while knocking back the safe-haven yen.
The People's Bank of China on Wednesday set the mid-point for the yuan at 6.5630 to the US dollar, virtually unchanged from firm fixes on the previous two days.
The central bank has also used aggressive intervention to engineer a huge leap in yuan borrowing rates in Hong Kong, essentially making it prohibitively expensive to short the currency.
The result has been to drag the offshore level of the yuan back toward the official level, closing a gap that had threatened to get out of control just a few days earlier.
Perceived missteps by the authorities had stoked concerns Beijing might be losing its grip on economic policy, just as the country looks set to post its slowest growth in 25 years.
Domestic equity markets reacted with only modest gains. The Shanghai Composite Index added 0.2 per cent and the CSI300 index 0.1 per cent. Both were still down around 14 per cent for the year so far.
