ID :
204813
Thu, 09/01/2011 - 17:53
Auther :
Shortlink :
https://oananews.org//node/204813
The shortlink copeid
Head of E. Asia's financial surveillance unit stresses independence+
SINGAPORE, Sept. 1 Kyodo -
East Asia's first ever financial surveillance unit should be independent even though it may work with other international organizations such as the International Monetary Fund, according to its first head.
''We would like to conduct our own work in an independent manner,'' Wei Benhua, director of the newly established ASEAN+3 Macroeconomic Research Office, said in a recent interview with Kyodo News at his office in Singapore.
He arrived in Singapore in May this year to head AMRO, which will run the $120 billion currency swap scheme, known as the Chiang Mai Initiative Multilateralization scheme. It was launched by ASEAN, China, Japan and South Korea in March last year to address balance-of-payments and short-term liquidity difficulties in East Asia.
Wei, 64, has worked at the People's Bank of China and was a former deputy administrator at China's State Administration of Foreign Exchange. He will lead the AMRO office for a one-year term.
In the interview he talked about what he believes should be the future relationship between AMRO and the IMF, with which some Asian countries had a bad experience in the 1998 Asian financial crisis due to the perceived harsh prescriptions meted out to them.
''No matter how bitter IMF policy was to some of the Asian countries, that was the past. We need to work with international financial institutions, including the IMF,'' he said.
''If we could have good cooperation with the IMF, which could provide really strong financial support to Asian countries, that is a good thing. It's like double protection,'' he added.
However, he stressed that the IMF should not have a rigid lending policy as in the past when it put pressure on the borrowing countries and tended to apply a simplistic diagnosis.
He said there are signs that the IMF itself is changing while the Asian economies ''really have become very strong after the Asian financial crisis.''
He said the $120 billion currency swap fund which his office oversees should be increased in the future.
''In the future, with the total size of the members increasing year-by-year, there must be a need to consider how we should proceed with increasing the size of the AMRO pooling system,'' he said.
However, he added that he believes there is currently no urgency to expand the size of the fund, aimed at helping the region ward off any financial crisis in future, even though there is a growing call for the fund to be increased or even doubled.
He said the creation of AMRO is a significant move toward an Asian monetary fund but that it will take some years in addition to economic and financial integration to achieve that.
Wei said AMRO's role is to produce a regional economic report on a quarterly basis and to monitor the process of dispensing financial assistance to any member that is in difficulty and requires help from AMRO.
''We will monitor the process and help the country overcome the problem of the crisis. In the meantime we would like to make sure once the problem is solved, the financial assistance would be put back to this reserve pooling system,'' he said.
ASEAN groups Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam.
==Kyodo
East Asia's first ever financial surveillance unit should be independent even though it may work with other international organizations such as the International Monetary Fund, according to its first head.
''We would like to conduct our own work in an independent manner,'' Wei Benhua, director of the newly established ASEAN+3 Macroeconomic Research Office, said in a recent interview with Kyodo News at his office in Singapore.
He arrived in Singapore in May this year to head AMRO, which will run the $120 billion currency swap scheme, known as the Chiang Mai Initiative Multilateralization scheme. It was launched by ASEAN, China, Japan and South Korea in March last year to address balance-of-payments and short-term liquidity difficulties in East Asia.
Wei, 64, has worked at the People's Bank of China and was a former deputy administrator at China's State Administration of Foreign Exchange. He will lead the AMRO office for a one-year term.
In the interview he talked about what he believes should be the future relationship between AMRO and the IMF, with which some Asian countries had a bad experience in the 1998 Asian financial crisis due to the perceived harsh prescriptions meted out to them.
''No matter how bitter IMF policy was to some of the Asian countries, that was the past. We need to work with international financial institutions, including the IMF,'' he said.
''If we could have good cooperation with the IMF, which could provide really strong financial support to Asian countries, that is a good thing. It's like double protection,'' he added.
However, he stressed that the IMF should not have a rigid lending policy as in the past when it put pressure on the borrowing countries and tended to apply a simplistic diagnosis.
He said there are signs that the IMF itself is changing while the Asian economies ''really have become very strong after the Asian financial crisis.''
He said the $120 billion currency swap fund which his office oversees should be increased in the future.
''In the future, with the total size of the members increasing year-by-year, there must be a need to consider how we should proceed with increasing the size of the AMRO pooling system,'' he said.
However, he added that he believes there is currently no urgency to expand the size of the fund, aimed at helping the region ward off any financial crisis in future, even though there is a growing call for the fund to be increased or even doubled.
He said the creation of AMRO is a significant move toward an Asian monetary fund but that it will take some years in addition to economic and financial integration to achieve that.
Wei said AMRO's role is to produce a regional economic report on a quarterly basis and to monitor the process of dispensing financial assistance to any member that is in difficulty and requires help from AMRO.
''We will monitor the process and help the country overcome the problem of the crisis. In the meantime we would like to make sure once the problem is solved, the financial assistance would be put back to this reserve pooling system,'' he said.
ASEAN groups Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam.
==Kyodo
