Sanctions against Iran's oil industry have left the country short on foreign currency reserves.
One thing we know is that these entities keep piling up foreign currency reserves which they are at pains to deploy.
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They got asset inflation in the form of higher property prices, but they also got rising current account deficits that eventually exhausted their foreign currency reserves.
This is, in other words, the opposite of trying to prop up a currency, which strains the foreign currency reserves of the central bank.
"Large foreign currency reserves and steadily declining inflation rates will provide policymakers with the necessary tools to nurse their economies through the hard times ahead, " the report said.
The higher foreign currency reserves carried by many African countries.
And still, Egypt's foreign currency reserves are being washed away.
In the 1980s when Iran's foreign currency reserves dried up, licensed exchange bureaux closed down and the black market was run by the street money-changers of Tehran's Ferdowsi Street.
Currently, China has less than 2% of its foreign currency reserves in gold bullion, compared with more than 70% for the U.S. and Germany, according to the World Gold Council, a trade group.
Argentina, Latin America's fastest-growing economy last year, has the most rigid exchange-rate system of all, with a currency board that fixes by law the value of the peso at parity with the dollar, and thus limits the money supply to the level of foreign currency reserves.
It has to have a stable, trustworthy government that is carrying out a set of constant development reforms that bring in new industries, reform the banking sector and have a good amount of foreign currency reserves in order to pay for foreign obligations and protect against attacks on their currencies.
All three countries have fixed exchange rates (currency boards in Estonia and Lithuania, a currency peg in Latvia) fully backed by foreign-currency reserves.
But with their foreign-currency reserves all but exhausted, other Asian countries would be hard-pressed to follow suit.
Another measure: Asia's central banks are again scooping up capital inflows and putting them into foreign-currency reserves.
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That suggests that one of its main interests in foreign investors may be their contribution to China's foreign-currency reserves.
The Bank of Thailand releases information about foreign-currency reserves, but it has not revealed how much of those have been committed to purchase baht in the future.
On an even grander scale is China's amassing of a trillion dollars in foreign-currency reserves, enough to roil financial oceans if it were ever suddenly to do other than to sit in U.S. Treasury bills.
To prop up its currency, a government can sell foreign-exchange reserves to buy that currency.
As the world's fastest-growing big economy, with the biggest current-account surplus and foreign reserves, its currency ought by rights to be rising.
By removing the need to accumulate vast foreign-exchange reserves, greater currency flexibility would also create a more stable global monetary system.
Mr Brooks and Fiona Lake, one of his colleagues, have looked at annual foreign-exchange interventions by central banks in emerging Asian economies, tracking the pace at which they built up reserves by buying foreign currency.
You advocate doing away with central banks and limiting currency issuance to the amount of foreign reserves.
Typically, governments hold cash reserves in their central bank as foreign exchange reserves for the purpose of stabilizing currency and management of liquidity.
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The published figures for the breakdown of reserves by currency omit China, even though the country accounts for a fifth of foreign-exchange reserves.
America also borrows in the currency other countries most want to hold in their own foreign-exchange reserves.
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Reserves need to be large enough to draw upon if foreign-currency financing suddenly dries up, and to ensure that trade flows smoothly.
Unlike a conventional central bank, which can print money at will, a currency board issues domestic notes and coins only when there are foreign-exchange reserves to back it.
And how long will Asian countries continue to spend money building up foreign-exchange reserves that earn next to nothing and carry the risk of currency losses, rather than use the money to invest in their own region, which seems set to grow an awful lot in coming years.
Cash reserves that have funded SWFs have accrued from several sources such as foreign currency deposits, gold holdings, Special Drawing Rights, petroleum, and state pensionsSWFs are essentially a byproduct of globalization.
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It will be used to bolster foreign-exchange reserves depleted by a failed attempt to prevent devaluation of the Thai currency, the baht, and further threatened by the flight of short-term foreign money.
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