Japan, China and South Korea joined forces on Tuesday to bolster Asia's defences against attacks on its currencies, setting aside political tensions that had threatened to derail regional economic cooperation, reported Reuters today. Finance ministers of Asia's largest economies agreed to closer cooperation on the Chiang Mai Initiative (CMI) -- a regional foreign exchange swap pact to combat speculative runs on currencies like those that swept the region in 1997/98. That sets the stage for their meeting on Wednesday with the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) which a senior Indonesian central banker said was likely to approve plans to double the size of the swap arrangement to over $70 billion. "We are proposing to double the size. Right now the total fund is $35.9 billion," Hartadi Sarwono, deputy Indonesian central bank governor, told Reuters. The success of the plan depends almost entirely on the economic might of China, Japan and South Korea, among the world's biggest holders of foreign exchange reserves. --More 2238 Local Time 1938 GMT
