ASEAN+3 eye expanded FX fund
Reuters
First Posted 15:07:00 11/21/2008
Filed Under: International (Foreign)Trade, Treaties & International Organisations, International Economic Institutions
MANILA -- Finance and central bank officials from 13 Asian nations agreed to recommend expanding an $80 billion pool of currency swaps to shield the region from the financial crisis, a Philippine official said on Friday.
The official, Finance Undersecretary Gil Beltran, had said in remarks on Thursday that the meeting had agreed to enlarge the fund by least the double the amount. However, other officials, including from South Korea, immediately reacted by saying no final decision had been made.
Clarifying his original comment, Beltran told Reuters to Friday that the officials from Southeast Asia, Japan, South Korea, and China had agreed to recommend the expansion.
"We agreed to recommend, because this is just recommendatory; we were ordered to think of how to implement this," he said.
Further discussions on how to implement the regional facility would take place in Hakone, Japan next week, with results of that meeting to be endorsed to finance ministers at a meeting a few days before an ASEAN summit in Thailand in December, Beltran said.
The leaders agreed in a meeting last month in Beijing to expand the Chiang Mai Initiative, a pool of bilateral currency swap lines created during the 1997 Asian financial crisis, into an $80 billion multilateral facility to be launched next year.
ASEAN groups Cambodia, Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, Vietnam, Philippines, Laos, Thailand, Myanmar and Brunei.
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