RBS Reserve Management Trends 2008 is the fourth in a series of annual publications that provides an ongoing commentary on official reserve management. Published in February of each year, the series draws on expert opinion and experience of practitioners to allow central bankers to benchmark their policies against those of their peers.

The book contains an exclusive report based on a survey, carried out in autumn 2007, of 50 central banks responsible for more than $2 trillion in reserves. The answers may well surprise you. Together, they give a unique insight into the challenges now faced by central bank reserve managers - and how they are facing up to these challenges. As well as detailed analysis of the answers, all comments and observations volunteered by reserve managers are reproduced in full.

This year the survey provides the first evidence about how central bank reserve managers expect the recent turmoil in financial markets to influence their reserve management policies. This year the survey focuses on five topical areas:

• How attitudes to ″non-traditional″ reserve assets have changed

• How reserve managers rate markets for liquidity

• How much central banks use external portfolio managers and the challenges they face in managing them

• How performance is rewarded for in-house and external managers

• How the rise of sovereign wealth funds will impact reserve management

Expert chapters from practitioners, academics and stakeholders investigate the choice of numeraire for reserve management, the use of external managers, diversification into emerging markets and first-hand accounts of reserve management in Brazil and Japan.

This book is also available to download in PDF form.

About the authors
List of abbreviations
Executive summary

1 Trends in reserve management - 2008 survey results
Nick Carver and Robert Pringle

2 Choosing the currency numeraire in managing official reserves
Robert N. McCauley

3 External managers: the Central Bank of Chile's experience
Jaime A. Lizana Gonzalez

4 The case for investing in emerging markets
Rashique Rahman

5 Why reserve managers should repo
Matt Sekerke

6 An active year for reserve managers
Central Banking Publications

7 Brazil goes for diversification
Interview by Nick Carver

8 How do we manage the reserves held by the Bank of Japan?
Toshio Idesawa

Appendix 1 Survey questionnaire
Appendix 2 Survey answers
Appendix 3 Reserve statistics

Editor, Robert Pringle, is Managing Director of Central Banking Publications. Before starting Central Banking, Robert was for several years Editor of The Banker and subsequently he was closely associated with the establishment of the well-known "think tank", the Group of Thirty, where he served for seven years as the first Executive Director based in New York. He was also for three years a Senior Fellow at the United Nations institute called WIDER in Helsinki.