China’s vast foreign exchange reserves showed on Friday their first quarterly drop since 1998. The decline was partly attributed to a slowing Chinese economy and capital outflows amid worldwide economic ambiguity. Reserves fell by $20.5bn to $3.18trn in the final quarter of 2011, said the People’s Bank of China.Net quarterly decreases are rare for China, which is momentarily the largest holder of foreign exchange reserves globally. On a year-on-year basis, however, the country’s fx reserves still expanded from its previous $2.85trn at the end of 2010, the bank said.

Argentina will enforce new restrictions on consumer goods’ imports by February in an effort to remedy its retreating trade surplus, according to a resolution published by the Revenue Office. The new regime will require importers to file a sworn statement of planned imports to the tax agency “prior to the issuing of the request, purchase order, or similar document used for completing overseas purchasing operations.” The statement will be checked by the correct authorities for an unspecified amount of time Officials will then give their consent or refusal to the person making the import application. In the first 11 months of 2011 imports in the country had climbed 33 percent to $67.99bn from the same period in 2010, while the overall trade balance dropped by 13 percent, official data showed.

Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao is scheduled to start a six day visit to the UAE, Qatar and Saudi Arabia to discuss the country’s energy policy, China’s foreign ministry said late on Tuesday. During the trip he will meet leaders of the three nations to “promote the development of China-Arab dealings and relations with the Islamic world,” its foreign minister Liu Weimin said. Saudi Arabia is currently China’s largest supplier of crude while Qatar has emerged as its biggest supplier of liquefied natural gas. Beijing is likely to soon overtake Washington as the biggest buyer of Saudi Arabian oil. Weimin’s announcement comes at a time when US Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner is in Beijing to seek support and promote sanctions on Iran’s oil industry.

Japan’s central bank has announced that it has already done enough to combat deflation, brushing off yet another call for more action from the ranks of the ruling party. Bank of Japan Deputy Governor Hirohide Yamaguchi dismissed a suggestion from a Democratic Party lawmaker that the central bank should consider scrapping a self-imposed cap on its government bond purchases to be able to buy more debt and reflate the economy. Yamaguchi told a parliamentary committee there could be turmoil in financial markets if they got the impression that the central bank was directly financing government debt. “We are aware that if the BOJ’s long-term bond buying is mistaken for monetising government debt, that could upset financial markets,” he said. The central bank has kept rates near zero and introduced several emergency funding schemes to help the economy recover from its worst slump since World War Two, but it has still been bombarded for weeks by government calls for more efforts. Yamaguchi, however, said he believed the crisis-fighting measures already in place should start bearing fruit soon. “I expect Japan’s economy to return to a sustainable growth path with price stability as early as possible as a result of the measures” the BOJ has taken so far, he said. Analysts say the pressure for more BOJ action reflected government fears that falling prices and a strong yen could push Japan back into recession in a year of upper house elections and its recognition that there was very little it could do […]

Swiss National Bank chair Philipp Hildebrand resigned late on Monday over a controversial personal foreign currency trade undertaken by his wife. Hildrebrand’s wife Kashya had switched SFr400,000 into dollars in mid August, just days before a Swiss National Bank intervention in the FX market. Hildebrand said at a press conference after his resignation: “I came to the conclusion that it is not possible for me to deliver a definite proof that my wife requested the currency transaction without my knowledge. Unfortunately, mistakes were made around this transaction.” Meanwhile, the bank has begun its search for a replacement. Vice Chairman Thomas Jordan, who has been with the Swiss National Bank almost five years, is said to take over temporarily, but may be confirmed by the government as the permanent replacement shortly after.