China’s Foreign Exchange Reserves Breach $2 Trillion

China’s foreign exchange reserves have topped $2 trillion–$2,131.6 billion at end-June to be precise. Hold the presses, whatever they are.
It is a symbolic number rather than anything else. While China’s exports have fallen (down 21.8% year-on-year in the first half to $521.5 billion), imports have fallen faster (down 25.4% to $424.6 billion over the [...]

BRICs and Brickbats Over The Dollar’s Reserve Currency Role

Brazil, Russia, India and China meet on Tuesday in Yekaterinburg for the first summit of the so-called BRICs, the four leading emerging economies.
They see themselves as a leading voice for the developing world and as a counterweight to the developed world’s dominance in international economic matters as represented by the G-7. As such they want [...]

Dollars, Coppers, Any Old Iron

A new twist in the saga of what China is doing with its still mostly dollars foreign exchange reserves: Brian Jackson, senior strategist at Royal Bank of Canada, reckons that it is using them to stockpile commodities such as copper and iron ore as the voices in Beijing fearing the ever rising cost of Washington’s [...]

China Becomes A Gold Bug

China says it is now the world’s fifth largest holder of gold. Hu Xiaolian, head of the State Administration of Foreign Exchange, told Xinhua that China’s gold reserves stood at 1,054 tonnes at the end of 2008. That is up by 454 tonnes from the last time the country made the size of its gold [...]

China’s Reserves Swell More Slowly

The country’s foreign exchange reserves grew in the first quarter by less than they did in the fourth quarter of last year. Reserves stood at $1.95 trillion at the end of March, the People’s Bank of China reports, up $7.7 trillion since the end of December, when they had shown a more than $40 billion [...]

Dollar-Bound

Even with a slowing economy and export markets slowing faster, China has a lot of trade surplus dollars to recycle. Its foreign-exchange reserves are in excess of $1 trillion and they sit mostly in U.S. dollar-denominated assets.
The American currency depreciated steadily for the past four years, though it has rallied recently. This may be a [...]

Hot Money Stops Flooding Into China

One unintended benefit for the economy from the global financial crisis is that the flow of hot money into China has slowed to a crawl or less.
The latest quarterly figures from the central bank show foreign exchange reserves rising to $1.9 trillion at the end of September, up from $1.8 trillion at the end of [...]

CIC Debut

The state agency set up to invest more profitably some of China’s $1.4 trillion of foreign exchange reserves formally opened for business on Saturday, even though it has already taken a $3 billion stake in U.S. private equity firm, Blackstone Group, back in May. 
China Investment Corporate (CIC) will start out with $200 billion in assets, [...]