Korea Ranks 8th in Terms of the Size of Forex Reserves
The Bank of Korea announced on April 5 that South Korea’s foreign exchange reserves decreased US$3.96 billion to US$457.81 billion last month.
Marketable securities accounted for 89.6 percent of the reserves, followed by deposits (5 percent), IMF SDR (3.4 percent), gold (1 percent) and IMF position (1 percent). The deposits and marketable securities fell 33.9 percent and 6.3 percent, respectively.
Last month, the value of the U.S. dollar increased and the USD Index, which shows the value of the USD in comparison to six major currencies, rose 1.2 percent from 96.6 to 97.79. Specifically, the USD-EUR exchange rate changed little from 1.1159 while the USD-GBP rate changed from 1.3346 to 1.3139. The USD-JPY and USD-AUD rates rose 5.3 percent and 4.6 percent to 121.97 and 0.7508, respectively.
South Korea ranked eighth in the world in terms of the size of foreign exchange reserves. China topped the list with US$3.2136 trillion, followed by Japan (US$1.3846 trillion), Switzerland (US$1.1 trillion), India (US$631.9 billion), Russia (US$617.1 billion), Taiwan (US$550 billion) and Hong Kong (US$490.9 billion). South Korea was followed by Saudi Arabia (US$441.3 billion) and Singapore (US$426.6 billion).