Asians to create reserve pool

Bloomberg

The amount is 50 percent more than the $80 billion that was proposed last May, and an expansion of the current arrangement called the Chiang Mai Initiative that allows only bilateral currency swaps.

Finance ministers and government officials from the 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations and their three northern neighbors announced the decision after their meeting in Phuket, Thailand, yesterday.

The fund is aimed at ensuring central banks have enough to shield their currencies from speculative attacks such as those that depleted the reserves of Indonesia, Thailand and South Korea during the 1997-1998 financial crisis.

Many Asian currencies have fallen in the past year, threatening to undermine regional stability, as fallout from the global creditcrunch ripples through their export-dependent economies.