Foreign-Reserve Ranking Disappears After 25 Years

The Bank of Korea has quietly removed a table that ranked countries by foreign-exchange reserves, ending a run that began in March 2001. The table appeared in every monthly release for more than 25 years, including the final page of the materials issued through last month.

The change drew attention when the bank released its latest foreign-reserves figures on the 3rd. Interest focused less on the reserve total than on the missing country ranking. No advance explanation accompanied the decision, leaving readers to ask why a familiar part of the release had disappeared.

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Economic forecasting also confirmed that it had little value.

The bank’s response was that the table had limited analytical value. The column links the decision to an earlier episode involving the U.S. Federal Reserve. In November 2005, the Fed said it would stop publishing M3, a measure combining cash and financial-sector deposits to show the total amount of money in circulation.

Former Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke said M3 had proved to have little value for economic forecasting. But the decision also prompted suspicion that the central bank wanted to conceal rapid money-supply growth that could fuel inflation. The comparison gives the Bank of Korea’s unexplained deletion a sharper edge, even as the bank points to the table’s limited usefulness.

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Analytical value is