The Treasury Department said Friday it has retained Japan, China and others on a list of countries it monitors over what it calls potentially "unfair" currency practices, but concluded that none of the U.S. trading partners is manipulating its currency to gain an unfair trade advantage.
Despite a sharp appreciation of the yen this year, the dollar-yen foreign exchange market has been functioning "smoothly," the department said in a semiannual report to Congress as it kept Japan, China, South Korea, Taiwan and Germany on the so-called "monitoring list" it created in a previous report released in April.
Switzerland was added to the list this time for what the department called the country's "significant foreign currency purchases over the last year."