This is, in other words, the opposite of trying to prop up a currency, which strains the foreign currency reserves of the central bank.
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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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.
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.
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.
Of course, they still need some reserves, to smooth out temporary gaps in the demand and supply of foreign currency.
The published figures for the breakdown of reserves by currency omit China, even though the country accounts for a fifth of foreign-exchange reserves.
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.
You advocate doing away with central banks and limiting currency issuance to the amount of foreign reserves.
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.
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.
That suggests that one of its main interests in foreign investors may be their contribution to China's foreign-currency reserves.
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.
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