• John Langlois, a Morgan Stanley banker in China, is a leading candidate to become the U.S. Treasury’s attaché in Beijing and help the country take steps to end its currency’s peg to the dollar, a person familiar with the matter said.
• U.S. Treasury Secretary John Snow announced the new position during a visit to China in September, amid charges by lawmakers and manufacturers that China’s currency policy and foreign-investment restrictions give it an unfair trade advantage that costs the U.S. jobs. The attaché will report directly to Snow.
• Langlois, 61, is president of Morgan Stanley’s Chinese property division. Until returning to China, he was a professor at Princeton University’s department for East Asian studies, which he joined in 1999. He previously worked at J.P. Morgan & Co. for 17 years, serving as its managing director and chief representative in Beijing and in various positions in Tokyo, Hong Kong, London and New York.
• “Jack Langlois has been doing China for decades, he speaks the language of finance effortlessly in both languages and he really knows his stuff,” said Robert Kapp, president of the U.S.-China Business Council, a Washington trade group that represents U.S. companies with Chinese operations such as Boeing Co. and Motorola Inc. “Having somebody like that as a Treasury liaison to the Chinese would be a very good thing.”

Source: Bloomberg