Originally posted by Fatum:
[b]
I suppose economic figures from China would be a bit like their
defence spending figures, no ? ... 
yes but why would they want to adjust their reserves down?
Having 130USD billion is no a big figure to shout about in China.
If the intention to to protect their currency, they should have
overstated their reserves. 
I'm not sure how much reserves the chinese had in 97, but I
don't think you do either ...
but that precisely emphasizes my point doesn't it ? ... no one knew
how much China had then to effectively defend the hong kong dollar
... so the raiders left it pretty much alone ...
The raiders did attack the HKD. Didnt the govt spend a huge part
of the reserves shoring up the stock market?
neways ... like I've written ... a better question would be, how do
we achieve accountability in our reserves ? ... to which I'd like
to add - without exposing publicly the true size of our reserves ?
...
Today the modeling techniques in finance are so advanced that
they can know
the portfolio of say Temasek holdings just by looking at their
monthly returns using mathematical techniques such as "factor
analysis" to compare the correlations with other indices in the
world.
Didnt the economist here make a model to estimate how much jobs
went to Singaporeans and foreigners?
The point is that the If the economic fundamentals are not good,
the hedge fund get always get a few experts to model and estimate
the size of the reserves.
