Is the standout 2012 hit for Shuree. PM Najib & his wife took a real beating for going to China to help boost business in Malaysia, at a time a racially polarised RED Malaysia and YELLOW Malaysia, were hell bent on it.
Today, that single visit seems to have given the Ringgit a small respite despite Bank Negara Malaysia, fumbling along the way.
It has also helped boost our country's reserves, which every fund manager in town, had expected to FALL.
CNBC has the story. Read Below:
How did Malaysia's central bank manage to simultaneously meddle in markets to support its currency and increase its foreign exchange reserves? That's a $500 million question.
Malaysia's central bank, Bank Negara Malaysia (BNM), said last week it was intervening in the market to support the ringgit, which was particularly hard hit in the "Trump tantrum" of emerging market fund outflows in the wake of Donald Trump's surprise U.S. election win on November 8.
That intervention should have showed up in the country's foreign-exchange reserves as a decline because the central bank would usually need to sell foreign currencies to purchase ringgit.
Instead, the central bank said on Tuesday that its international reserves amounted to 407.8 billion ringgit, equivalent to $98.3 billion, as of November 15. That compared with the 405.5 billion ringgit, or $97.8 billion, it had as of October 31, according to a November 7 statement.
BNM didn't immediately answer emailed requests for comment on the unusual rise in reserves, but at least one analyst noted the seeming discrepancy in the figures.
"A surprise increase in foreign-exchange reserves and BNM reassuring investors that capital markets and the banking system is deep and liquid in their policy statement leaves more questions than answers," Jason Daw, a foreign-exchange analyst at Societe Generale, said in a note on Thursday.
"Valuation effects alone should have caused reserves to fall and it is unlikely that dollar buying occurred in the November 1-15 period," he said, speculating that Malaysia's swap line with China's central bank, the People's Bank of China (PBOC), may have been tapped for dollar liquidity.
The swap arrangement allows the two central banks to provide liquidity in each other's currencies, primarily aimed at supporting trade and investment.
