In an attempt to be fair and balanced

link to a paper

The World Bank put more emphasis on reserves to short-term debt in their assessment, and came to a rather different conclusion in their spring report on Global Development Finance.  Indeed, the World Bank, to be honest, seems a bit ahead of the IMF on this issue.  I should emphasize though that the output of a couple of economists in the research department does not reflect the collective judgment of the IMF.  But I have not seen a clear statement from the IMF that China now has more reserves than it needs either.

Both China’s overall reserves to GDP ratio (heading toward 50% at the end of the year) and the pace of its reserve accumulation (near 15% of GDP) are way high for a major economy.  China makes Japan look massively under-reserved, since Japan’s reserves are less than 20% fo its GDP.  And it certainly makes the US look under-reserved.  The US holds less than 1% of GDP as reserves (and getting close to 1% of GDP requires a pretty generous definition of reserves).  I can accept that China needs ten times as many reserves as the US, even twenty times as many.  But fifty or more?