IFR Asia: We were talking about very long tenor borrowing earlier. Is that something Kexim would consider to extend the Korea policy bank yield curve? . Why not issue a100-year bond and pre-fund? Kim Jin-kyung: Kexim needs to balance maturities on the asset and liability side. Beyond 10 years we have some assets but beyond that there are no assets to match this tenor. We are one of the few banks in Korea that lends on a fixed rate basis and from a risk management point of view we need to match t

IFR Asia: Shouldn’t there be more sterilisation of regional reserves, given the risk of creating an asset bubble? James McCormack: Sterilisation is taking place in China, with the PBOC regularly issuing a large volume of securities and increasing banks’ reserve requirements to absorb excess liquidity. And if you look at Asian central bank balance sheets when they are buying dollars the only thing they can pay for dollars is with their local currency. So money supply is going up and that’s inflat

IFR Asia: It’s 10 years since the Asian financial crisis. Would it be fair to say that the region is now immune from a systemic meltdown induced by foreign exchange or capital markets? Ping Chew: Standard and Poor’s and the other agencies have upgraded sovereign ratings across Asia and in fact globally, and this is the fifth year where overall upgrades have outpaced downgrades. In large part that’s because we think that Asia’s sovereigns are in a better position to withstand the kind of systemic

IFR Asia convened its first sovereign roundtable last month in Kyoto, where key players in the region’s capital markets had assembled for the 40th annual general meeting of the Asian Development Bank. As delegates to that meeting debated the challenges facing Asia as its growth powers forward, driven by the economic powerhouses of China and India, and as the Asian financial crisis of 10 years ago seems a mere glitch on the region’s relentless ascent, it seemed opportune to bring together key par