KUALA LUMPUR: Bank Negara Malaysia (BNM) said its international reserves have strengthened 0.3% to US$100.8 billion as at Sept 15, compared with US$100.5 billion half a month earlier. In a statement, it said that the reserves were sufficient to finance 7.7 months of retained imports and were 1.1 times the short-term external debt. It said total assets as at Sept 15 stood at RM464.97 billion, up almost 1% from RM460.4 billion as at Aug 30, according to a report in edgemarkets.com.
In the same statement, BNM criticised the “unbalanced and simplistic” assessment of Malaysia’s international reserves adequacy in a Bloomberg report. It said Bloomberg’s recent article titled Malaysia Reserve Buffer Seen by Moody’s as Among Weakest in Asia focused only on a rigid interpretation of two economic indicators. BNM said the two indicators used, Moody’s External Vulnerability Indicator (EVI) and International Monetary Fund (IMF)’s Reserve Adequacy Metric (ARA EM), did not portray a broad enough review of Malaysia’s economic and financial developments.
