Mark Mobius, who was known as the father of emerging markets and was among the first fund managers to invest in Hong Kong and mainland China, died on Wednesday at the age of 89, according to a statement on his LinkedIn account. The statement did not give the cause. Mobius was based in Dubai in…
In the summer of 1998, the usually placid air at the Hong Kong Monetary Authority’s headquarters in Citibank Tower suddenly evaporated as regional currencies collapsed like dominoes. Rapacious speculators had shorted currencies such as the Thai baht, the Indonesian rupiah and the Korean won and had profited handsomely. The contagion looked like it would also…
Financial Secretary Paul Chan Mo-po delivered his latest budget on February 25. Over the past decade, under his stewardship, Hong Kong has weathered multiple economic shocks and recently returned to a respectable growth rate of 3.5 per cent. Yet the tasks ahead are formidable: addressing a structural fiscal deficit in the city’s capital account while…
When Hong Kong’s Housing Authority launched the Tenants Purchase Scheme (TPS) in 1998, it embodied the city’s aspiration of home ownership for all. Then the chief executive, Tung Chee-hwa, envisioned public housing tenants buying their flats at a discount, transforming renters into homeowners. That year, the first batch of 25,000 flats was rolled out. In…
HSBC Holdings has taken the unusual step of getting directly involved in pushing its Hong Kong subsidiary, Hang Seng Bank, to offload portfolios of bad real estate debt, underscoring growing concerns over the city’s struggling property sector. About two months ago, the lender directed its London-based global chief corporate credit officer and the head of…
In a commercial rental market beset by high vacancy rates, many Hong Kong landlords feel stuck between a rock and a hard place: giving tenants a break on rent makes it harder to pay mortgages and threatens asset value, but holding the line on rent runs the risk of driving tenants away. In this difficult…
Two of Hong Kong’s largest fast-food chains, Cafe de Coral and Fairwood, both suffered a near 30 per cent drop in profits last year, with experts attributing their struggles during the economic downturn to ageing diners and intense competition from delivery platforms. The two companies were considered resilient players during previous downturns caused by global…
In financial markets, the Hong Kong dollar is known as a “widow-maker”, a ruinous trade that inflicts painful losses on successive generations of investors. While betting against Japanese government bonds has been the most notorious widow-maker trade, challenges to Hong Kong’s currency peg to the US dollar date back to the 1997-98 Asian financial crisis…