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WRAPUP 1-S.Korea sells dlrs, pulls won back from 11-yr low
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WRAPUP 1-S.Korea sells dlrs, pulls won back from 11-yr low
Reuters - Tuesday, March 3
* South Korea intervenes heavily as won plunges
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* Intervention seen aimed at taming, not reversing, won drop
* Foreign debt woes limit ammunition for intervention
* Factories slash inventories, exports tumble
By Yoo Choonsik
SEOUL, March 2 - South Korea sold some $1 billion to stem the won's plunge on Monday, traders said but added it looked more aimed at calming the panic than a reversal of a recently adopted policy to let the market set the rate.
Won <KRW=> fell 2.6 percent on Monday, recovering some of its early 3.8 percent loss to an 11-year low thanks to the suspected dollar-selling intervention.
It has lost 20 percent so far this year after a 26 percent drop last year, pressured both by fears of an external funding squeeze and mounting signs that Asia's fourth-largest economy was on course for its first recession in more than a decade.
"The authorities will probably continue to step in when necessary to tame the won's excessive drop, but I don't think they will attempt to turn the won's falling direction itself," said Jeong My-young, an FX strategist at Samsung Futures.
"They do not seem to have any intention or ability (to change its course)," she said, adding that growing concerns about the health of the global economy and the financial sector required South Korea to maintain sizeable foreign reserves for a rainier day.
Newly-appointed Finance Minister Yoon Jeung-hyun said last week a cheap won was not necessarily bad for the export-oriented economy, which analysts took to mean he would not authorise massive dollar-selling interventions seen in the past. [ID:nSEO51452]
A senior official at the Finance Ministry told reporters the authorities would do their best to stabilise the currency market, but stopped short of threatening to beef up intervention so much as to lift the won.
SHORT OF AMMUNITION
"We have been doing our utmost to stabilise the market while taking into account external environments, and we will continue to do so," Kim Ik-joo, head of the ministry's international finance bureau, told reporters after local currency trade ended.
South Korea is struggling to allay investor fears that the heightened global risk aversion could deny its banks access to foreign currency to refinance maturing overseas debt.
It has said the country did not have to pay back all its $194 billion of foreign debt due within this year because some is linked to currency-hedging by shipbuilders. But analysts said the amount is less important than the ability to borrow.
The government announced last week incentives to tempt foreigners to buy its domestic bonds and plans to issue sovereign bonds abroad for the first time in three years in an effort to lure as much of foreign currencies as possible into the country. [ID:nSEO269686]
But foreign investors have been selling out of South Korea's stock markets for 15 consecutive sessions as the tumbling won and the first looming recession in 11 years sapped confidence in the country's equities.
Latest data released on Monday added to the economic gloom showing manufacturers slashed inventories and halted more production in January, while exports in the first two months of the year plunged by more than a quarter. [ID:nSEO217655]
The won's fall also evoked bitter memories of the 1997-1998 Asian financial crisis, when the won's over 50 percent drop in just three months had put the country on the verge of a sovereign insolvency.
The country barely averted the catastrophe with the help from an International Monetary Fund-led bailout and after global lenders rolled over the country's maturing foreign debt in early 1998, but in that year, the economy shrank 6.9 percent. (Additional reporting by Lee Kyoung-ho and Cheon Jong-woo; Editing by Jonathan Thatcher and Tomasz Janowski)
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