The IMF released its COFER data Friday night and it contained a surprise forAustralian dollar bears. Total foreign holdings of the battler rose in the March 2015 quarter to $113,834 million, up 4.1% in a quarter:
This is US dollar values, so despite the Aussie falling 8.2% from an average 85 cents in the Dec ’14 QTR to 78 cents in the Mar ’15 QTR, reserves accumulation rose. That suggests that central bank buying of the Aussie accelerated dramatically as prices fell.
Even more bizarre, emerging market currency reserves collapsed at the fastest pace in 20 years as US dollar liquidity dried up, from BNP Paribas:
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In a highly unusual development, emerging-market FX reserves have been falling steadily since the middle of last year. The IMF’s COFER figures, the gold standard for FX reserve data, show that emerging-market reserves have dropped for three successive quarters, from a peak of USD 8.06trn at end Q2 2014 to USD 7.5trn by end Q1 2015. COFER data are not yet available for Q2, but we have been able to build an estimate from already released second-quarter national data. Our bottom-up estimate of around USD 6.9trn at the end of Q1 captures 92% of the IMF’s emerging-market aggregate. By our estimates, emerging-market reserves continued to fall in Q2, albeit marginally, by USD 21bn or so.
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David Llewellyn-Smith is Chief Strategist at the MB Fund and MB Super. David is the founding publisher and editor of MacroBusiness and was the founding publisher and global economy editor of The Diplomat, the Asia Pacific’s leading geo-politics and economics portal.
He is also a former gold trader and economic commentator at The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, the ABC and Business Spectator. He is the co-author of The Great Crash of 2008 with Ross Garnaut and was the editor of the second Garnaut Climate Change Review.
In a highly unusual development, emerging-market FX reserves have been falling steadily since the middle of last year. The IMF’s COFER figures, the gold standard for FX reserve data, show that emerging-market reserves have dropped for three successive quarters, from a peak of USD 8.06trn at end Q2 2014 to USD 7.5trn by end Q1 2015. COFER data are not yet available for Q2, but we have been able to build an estimate from already released second-quarter national data. Our bottom-up estimate of around USD 6.9trn at the end of Q1 captures 92% of the IMF’s emerging-market aggregate. By our estimates, emerging-market reserves continued to fall in Q2, albeit marginally, by USD 21bn or so.
