China ‘lost billions’ on investments

China has lost tens of billions of dollars of its forex reserves through a poorly timed diversification into global equities just before world markets collapsed last year. The State Administration of Foreign Exchange, the opaque manager of nearly $2,000bn of reserves, made huge bets on global stocks early in 2007 and continued at least until July 2008, by which point SAFE had moved well over 15% of China’s reserves into riskier assets.