IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/nzb/nzbbul/sep201204.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Foreign currency reserves: why we hold them influences how we fund them

Author

Listed:

Abstract

This article reviews New Zealand’s approach to funding foreign currency reserves: a mix of holding foreign currency assets funded by outright purchases of foreign exchange, borrowing foreign currency long term to fund foreign currency assets, and swapping local currency assets for foreign currency assets for a long term. The use of borrowed and hedged reserves is unusual, but not unique, among floating exchange rate countries with liberalised financial markets. We consider the reasons for holding reserves, and the connection between these reasons and the costs and benefits of each of the funding options that New Zealand has chosen.

Suggested Citation

  • Anella Munro & Michael Reddell, 2012. "Foreign currency reserves: why we hold them influences how we fund them," Reserve Bank of New Zealand Bulletin, Reserve Bank of New Zealand, vol. 75, pages 35-45, September.
    • Handle: RePEc:nzb:nzbbul:sep2012:04
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.rbnz.govt.nz/-/media/ReserveBank/Files/Publications/Bulletins/2012/2012sep75-3munroreddell.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Maurice Obstfeld & Jay C. Shambaugh & Alan M. Taylor, 2005. "The Trilemma in History: Tradeoffs Among Exchange Rates, Monetary Policies, and Capital Mobility," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 87(3), pages 423-438, August.
    2. Obstfeld, Maurice & Shambaugh, Jay C. & Taylor, Alan M., 2004. "The Trilemma in History: Tradeoffs among Exchange Rates, Monetary Policies, and Capital Mobility," Department of Economics, Working Paper Series qt4rq9v2rb, Department of Economics, Institute for Business and Economic Research, UC Berkeley.
    3. Patrick McGuire & Goetz von Peter, 2012. "The Dollar Shortage in Global Banking and the International Policy Response," International Finance, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 15(2), pages 155-178, June.
    4. Anella Munro & Philip Wooldridge, 2011. "Motivations for swap-covered foreign currency borrowing," BIS Papers chapters, in: Bank for International Settlements (ed.), Currency internationalisation: lessons from the global financial crisis and prospects for the future in Asia and the Pacific, volume 61, pages 19-56, Bank for International Settlements.
    5. Baba, Naohiko & Packer, Frank, 2009. "Interpreting deviations from covered interest parity during the financial market turmoil of 2007-08," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 33(11), pages 1953-1962, November.
    6. Obstfeld, Maurice & Shambaugh, Jay C. & Taylor, Alan M., 2004. "The Trilemma in History: Tradeoffs among Exchange Rates, Monetary Policies, and Capital Mobility," Center for International and Development Economics Research, Working Paper Series qt4rq9v2rb, Center for International and Development Economics Research, Institute for Business and Economic Research, UC Berkeley.
    7. Michael Gordon, 2005. "Foreign reserves for crisis management," Reserve Bank of New Zealand Bulletin, Reserve Bank of New Zealand, vol. 68, March.
    8. Kelly Eckhold & Chris Hunt, 2005. "The Reserve Bank of New Zealand’s new foreign exchange intervention policy," BIS Papers chapters, in: Bank for International Settlements (ed.), Foreign exchange market intervention in emerging markets: motives, techniques and implications, volume 24, pages 231-41, Bank for International Settlements.
    9. Patrick McGuire & Goetz von Peter, 2009. "The US dollar shortage in global banking," BIS Quarterly Review, Bank for International Settlements, March.
    10. Kelly Eckhold & Chris Hunt, 2005. "The Reserve Bank's new foreign exchange intervention policy," Reserve Bank of New Zealand Bulletin, Reserve Bank of New Zealand, vol. 68, March.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Ding Ding & Mr. Werner Schule & Ms. Yan M Sun, 2014. "Cross-Country Experience in Reducing Net Foreign Liabilities: Lessons for New Zealand," IMF Working Papers 2014/062, International Monetary Fund.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Zheng, Huanhuan, 2023. "Original sin redux and deviations from covered interest parity," Journal of International Money and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 139(C).
    2. Steiner, Andreas, 2013. "The accumulation of foreign exchange by central banks: Fear of capital mobility?," Journal of Macroeconomics, Elsevier, vol. 38(PB), pages 409-427.
    3. Piotr Misztal, 2011. "The Feldstein-Horioka Hypothesis in Countries with Varied Levels of Economic Development," Contemporary Economics, Vizja University, vol. 5(2), June.
    4. Claudia Buch & Catherine Koch & Michael Koetter, 2016. "Crises and rescues: liquidity transmission through international banks," BIS Working Papers 576, Bank for International Settlements.
    5. Dongwon Lee & Yu-chin Chen, 2014. "What Makes a Commodity Currency?," Working Papers 201420, University of California at Riverside, Department of Economics.
    6. Huang, Wendi & Zhang, Weikang, 2024. "Exchange rate and corporate investment: Heterogeneous effects via the global value chain networks," Journal of International Money and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 147(C).
    7. Georgiadis, Georgios & Zhu, Feng, 2021. "Foreign-currency exposures and the financial channel of exchange rates: Eroding monetary policy autonomy in small open economies?," Journal of International Money and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 110(C).
    8. Andrei Hrebenciuc & Silvia-Elena Iacob & Alexandra Constantin & Maxim Cetulean & Georgiana-Tatiana Bondac, 2025. "The Employment Trilemma in the European Union: Linking Academia, Industry, and Sustainability Through Dynamic Panel Evidence," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 17(13), pages 1-18, July.
    9. Georgios Georgiadis & Feng Zhu, 2019. "Monetary policy spillovers, capital controls and exchange rate flexibility, and the financial channel of exchange rates," GRU Working Paper Series GRU_2019_009, City University of Hong Kong, Department of Economics and Finance, Global Research Unit.
    10. Linda S Goldberg, 2009. "Understanding Banking Sector Globalization," IMF Staff Papers, Palgrave Macmillan, vol. 56(1), pages 171-197, April.
    11. McQuade, Peter & Falagiarda, Matteo & Tirpák, Marcel, 2015. "Spillovers from the ECB's non-standard monetary policies on non-euro area EU countries: evidence from an event-study analysis," Working Paper Series 1869, European Central Bank.
    12. Cezar, Rafael & Monnet, Eric, 2023. "Capital controls and foreign reserves against external shocks: Combined or alone?," Journal of International Money and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 137(C).
    13. Bekaert, Geert & Hoerova, Marie & Xu, Nancy, 2023. "Risk, Monetary Policy and Asset Prices in a Global World," CEPR Discussion Papers 18229, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
    14. di Giovanni, Julian & Shambaugh, Jay C., 2008. "The impact of foreign interest rates on the economy: The role of the exchange rate regime," Journal of International Economics, Elsevier, vol. 74(2), pages 341-361, March.
    15. Ethan Ilzetzki & Carmen M Reinhart & Kenneth S Rogoff, 2019. "Exchange Arrangements Entering the Twenty-First Century: Which Anchor will Hold?," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 134(2), pages 599-646.
    16. Caputo, Rodrigo, 2015. "Persistent real misalignments and the role of the exchange rate regime," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 135(C), pages 112-116.
    17. Hiro Ito & Masahiro Kawai, 2012. "New Measures of the Trilemma Hypothesis: Implications for Asia," ADBI Working Papers 381, Asian Development Bank Institute.
    18. Hail Park & Jong Chil Son, 2022. "Dollarization, inflation and foreign exchange markets: A cross‐country analysis," International Journal of Finance & Economics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 27(3), pages 2724-2736, July.
    19. Bazot, Guillaume & Monnet, Eric & Morys, Matthias, 2019. "Taming the gobal financial cycle: Central banks and the sterilization of capital flows in the first era of globalization," IBF Paper Series 03-19, IBF – Institut für Bank- und Finanzgeschichte / Institute for Banking and Financial History, Frankfurt am Main.
    20. Aizenman, Joshua, 2010. "The Impossible Trinity (aka The Policy Trilemma)," Santa Cruz Department of Economics, Working Paper Series qt9k29n6qn, Department of Economics, UC Santa Cruz.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:nzb:nzbbul:sep2012:04. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Reserve Bank of New Zealand Knowledge Centre (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/rbngvnz.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.