Author Archives: Menzie Chinn

VoxEU: “The Russian sanctions and dollar foreign exchange reserves”

From a VoxEU article today, by Robert N. McCauley with Hiro Ito and Menzie Chinn:

Will the freezing of the Bank of Russia’s foreign exchange reserves undermine the dollar’s predominant role in official foreign exchange reserves? This column examines the aggregate evidence since end-2021 for any reduction in the dollar share of official foreign exchange reserves against a baseline constructed with data from 1999 through 2021. The observed dollar share in March 2024 differs little from the out-of-sample projection based on this baseline. On this showing, official reserve managers have not reduced the role of the dollar since the freeze of the Bank of Russia’s assets.

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