The experience of the 1997-98 East Asian crisis encouraged many developing countries to accumulate vast sums of foreign exchange reserves in order to self-insure against future crises. As our chart…

The IMF’s reserve metric tends to overstate the reserve needs of current account surplus countries with little external debt, and understates the reserve needs of current account deficit countries wi…

The change in China’s headline reserves is actually one of the least reliable indicators of China’s true intervention in the foreign currency market. Valuation changes create a lot of noise. And it i…