BNM foreign reserves exceed US$100 billion

(NST) – Bank Negara Malaysia’s (BNM) foreign reserves, which have been on the uptrend, have touched the US$100.4 billion mark (equivalent to RM431.0 billion).

BNM said the US$1 billion increase, as at August 15 (from July 31), is sufficient to finance 7.9 months of retained imports and is 1.1 times the short-term external debt.

Last week, central bank governor Datuk Muhammad Ibrahim said the reserves were only about a quarter of total external assets, with the remaining external assets held by banks and corporations.

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(LSS) – Those who were saying that Malaysia’s Foreign Reserves were in free-fall a couple of years back will be eating their words.

Today, BNM announced that its foreign reserves have exceeded US$100b (RM431.0 billion) again after climbing steadily over the past year.

However, foreign reserves is just one quarter of the external assets that our country has.

Our total external assets is RM1,717 billion as at Q2 2017 compared to our external liabilities (which includes the so-called External Debt of RM877 billion) of RM1,674 billion.

This means the rest of the world owes Malaysia more than Malaysia owes the rest of the world – despite what the Pakatan propaganda says.

P.S. Malaysia used to have only USD20 billion of foreign reserves in the early 1990s – but even then, the BNM FOREX scandal of Mahathir meant we lost more than half of our foriegn reserves then.

If the same scandal happened today, It is equivalent to our BNM losing USD60 billion (or about RM260 billion) with no chance of recovery.