The Chinese Yuan crashed today, according to Google

Google Finance

Google was wrong, everything is fine. But wasn't the only service to show the sketchy numbers. Earlier this afternoon, a scary sight appeared elsewhere, including the popular currency portal XE.com: a surprise 10% drop in the value of the Chinese currency against the dollar. That's a huge fall, far beyond the slim 2% movements typically allowed by the Chinese government.

It came just days after Donald Trump's surprise phone call to the newly-elected president of Taiwan, and less than 24 hours after some pointed Trump tweets about Chinese trade policy.

Plenty of economic and foreign policy watchers were already worried about how China would react — so was this its response, a massive surprise devaluation of a currency that Trump insists is already being kept at artificially low levels to hurt American industry?

Foreign Policy took the bait. "Could Beijing have have just answered President-elect Donald Trump’s weekend provocations?" the magazine asked.

But few other outlets — and nobody in the financial press — took the drop seriously. Within a few hours, XE.com was reporting the yuan had suddenly shot back up to normal.

The massive swing in the numbers appears to have been caused by one London-based broker, ICAP, which was quoting a price for the yuan that was being fed into the services that supply financial data to the world. The rates were not being matched by anyone else in the market, but they seem to have fed through to the price figures being quoted by Google Finance and XE.com, among others.

An ICAP spokesperson could not immediately comment on the apparent abnormality. Bloomberg included ICAP's quotes among its many data sources, but was quoting the yuan at 6.88 to the dollar today.

One possibility is that an ICAP trader accidentally quoted yuan at the euro exchange rate instead of the dollar. According to Bloomberg, the yuan was trading at 7.39 to the euro today.

The People's Bank of China, the country's central bank, actually upped the midpoint that the nation's currency trades around Tuesday morning following the exchange rate mishap.

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