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BEIJING, May 7 - Finance ministers from 13 Asian nations have agreed to pool part of their 2.7 trillion U.S. dollars of foreign-exchange reserves.
The move is aimed at preventing a repeat of the crisis that depleted1 the region's holdings 10 years ago, Bloomberg News reported. "We unanimously agreed in principle that a self-managed reserve pooling arrangement" is appropriate, China's Jin Renqing, Japan's Koji Omi, South Korea's Kwon Okyu and finance ministers from Southeast Asia said in a statement in Kyoto, Japan, on Saturday. Countries in the region face the challenge of "greater financial market volatilities." Asian governments want to avoid having to rely on institutions like the International Monetary2 Fund, which forced them to adopt harsh economic policies in return for bailouts during the 1997-98 financial crisis. The ministers haven't decided3 how the plan will work, how much money will be involved, or set a date, saying it needs more study. This is "just the latest of a number of regional initiatives which have promised great things but then fizzled out," said Mark Williams, an economist4 at London-based Capital Economics. It's hard to argue the move is "anything more than a symbolic5 step." A year ago, ministers from the same countries said in Hyderabad, India, they'd study the creation of an index of the region's currencies as a precursor6 to forming a single currency at some stage. The ministers meet each year on the sidelines of the Asian Development Bank annual gathering7. "A relatively8 modest proposal for a currency index comprising a weighted basket of regional currencies has been bogged9 down in wrangling," said Williams. Officials from the ADB now agree the proposal of a single currency is "many decades from being viable10." The finance ministers on Saturday agreed to expand on an arrangement established in 2000 in Chiang Mai, Thailand, whereby pairs of nations would lend each other money at favorable terms if help is needed to support their exchange rates.
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