Chinese yuan joins the IMF's basket of reserve currencies

China's yuan on Saturday was added to the International Monetary Fund's basket of reserve currencies, a win for the country's growing economy. As explained by the IMF, the Special Drawing Rights basket is "an international reserve asset, created by the IMF in 1969 to supplement its member countries' official reserves," and is currently valued at about $285 billion.

Other elite currencies currently in the SDR basket are the U.S. dollar, the British pound, the Japanese yen, and the Euro, which replaced the German deutsche mark and the French franc in 1999. With the new addition, IMF will weight the dollar at 41.73 percent, the euro at 30.93 percent, the yuan at 10.92 percent, the yen at 8.33 percent, and the pound at 8.09 percent.

This inclusion is "a milestone in the internationalization of the [yuan]," said the People's Bank of China, the Asian nation's central bank, "and is an affirmation of the success of China's economic development and results of the reform and opening up of the financial sector."

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