4. China's overall impact on U.S. growth will be small.
The move today isn't big enough to offset the yuan's appreciation over the last year, so it's not likely that it will immediately affect China's growth rate by itself, Goldman Sachs analyst MK Tang said in a note to clients. Because the People's Bank of China's policy shift changes the government's formula for valuing the currency to give greater weight to market prices in a system that is a hybrid of state and market control, it's too soon to tell whether the 2 percent drop will be all that's in the pipeline, Tang explained. But even a 5 percent drop wouldn't meaningfully affect China's exports, Morgan Stanley's Helen Qiao said in a March 6 report.