Then, the convention was that currencies were freelyconvertible not to gold but to other currencies that were themselves theoretically convertible to gold (read: the dollar and sometimes the pound).
But Dino Kos, a former chief of markets at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York who now works for Portales Partners, a research firm, notes that the yuan does not meet one of the most basic requirements of a reserve currency: other countries cannot use it to intervene in foreign-exchange markets because it is not freelyconvertible.