COMMENT | The month of September will mark a low point for Prime Minister Najib Abdul Razak with the forex Royal Commission of Inquiry (RCI) and his US trip. If only he knew that the opposition and the people of Malaysia understand his every move.

In the RCI, Nor Mohamed Yakcop, one of the most important figures in Bank Negara Malaysia (BNM) in the 1980s, affirmed that neither Mahathir nor Anwar Ibrahim were informed of the forex losses. Nor Mohamed explained in a careful but objective statement at the RCI that several key events forced BNM to enter into the fray of forex trading.

First, the Japanese yen had strengthened more than 50 percent after the Plaza Accord in 1986, where members of the G7 allowed the yen to trend upward. Malaysia carried yen loans from various infrastructure projects and BNM entered into the volatile currency market – beyond the preservation of the value of the ringgit, they did so to help Malaysia increase its profits, reduce its losses and consolidate its reserves.

Unlike 1MDB, the forex losses were driven by the higher motivation of saving the country economically from an adverse international financial environment, where even the Bank of England made the wrong bet on its own pound...