www射-国产免费一级-欧美福利-亚洲成人福利-成人一区在线观看-亚州成人

OPINION> Liang Hongfu
HK needs daring action plan
By Hong Liang (China Daily)
Updated: 2008-11-04 07:50

The Hong Kong government has established a blue-ribbon council, whose members include some of the best minds in business and academia, to address the economic problems created by the fallout of global credit crisis.

As an international financial center, Hong Kong is supposed to have taken a direct hit from the financial tsunami. But the damage so far has been limited to the stock market and the investment banking sector. Aside from the rumor-fed and short-lived run on a large local bank, the financial system of Hong Kong has remained unfettered.

Because of dwindling overseas orders, some Hong Kong exporters have either scaled back or closed down their manufacturing facilities in the Pearl River Delta region on the mainland. But unemployment in Hong Kong is not showing any sign of rising on a big scale.

If you think that Hong Kong can get away lightly in this financial tsunami, think again.

Government planners and economists have repeatedly sounded the warning that the worse is yet to come. They are not crying wolves.

The slowdown in the growth of Hong Kong's all-important financial services sector seems unavoidable. Investment banking in Hong Kong has largely gone into hibernation during the capital market chill when such normal fund raising activities as IPOs, rights issues and mergers and acquisitions have ceased.

The creation and sales of derivatives products, once the core business of investment banks, have grinded to a halt as these products are becoming an increasingly hard sell to shell-shocked investors, many of whom are still counting their losses from investing in sub-prime mortgage and other equally risky debt instruments that have gone off the cliff.

If there is to be a significant flight to quality, which, in Hong Kong's case, means bank deposits, it is not going to bring too much cheers to the commercial banks at a time when lending, even in the inter-bank market, is not seen to be as assured as before.

Losses directly associated with the US credit crisis may be too small to make any significant dent in the balance sheets of Hong Kong commercial banks. What bankers worry about most could be the specter of a property market crash, leading to a massive wave a defaults on mortgage loans.

Property project financing and mortgage lending have been the bread-and-butter business of many Hong Kong banks. What's more, the property market is a source of wealth, either directly or indirectly, of many Hong Kong corporations that engage in a variety of businesses.

There is very little Hong Kong can do to stimulate overseas demand for its re-exports. Neither can it do much in reviving the ravaged capital market and the moribund investment banking industry, which are subject to external influence.

Defenders of Hong Kong's traditional economic policy of positive non-interventionism have always considered government intervention to be not only futile but counter-productive as it would create even graver problems by distorting and prolonging the automatic adjustment process.

To be sure, the economy, if allowed to run its course, will eventually regain equilibrium. But doing nothing to lessen the pain of the adjustment process is politically unacceptable in this time and age when people's expectations have risen to a much higher plane than a couple of decades ago before Hong Kong made the jump from a labor-intensive manufacturing base to a high-value-added service center.

Of course, this is not the first time Hong Kong must face up to externally-induced economic problems of varying levels of severity. Staring down the abyss of recession in the early 1990s, the then Hong Kong government embarked on the so-called "Rose Garden Project" centering on the building of the new international airport.

To save Hong Kong from certain recession now, the government and its advisors may have to come up with an even more daring plan, knowing that no action isn't an option.

E-mail: jamesleung@chinadaily.com.cn

(China Daily 11/04/2008 page8)

主站蜘蛛池模板: 99九九精品国产高清自在线 | 一级视频免费观看 | 国产一级做a爰片久久毛片99 | 看全黄男人和女人视频 | 欧美精品片在线观看网站 | 欧美大片毛片aaa免费看 | 成人免费午夜视频 | 成 人 黄 色 视频 免费观看 | 欧美成人高清在线视频大全 | 日韩人成| 国产精品亚洲高清一区二区 | 韩国啪啪网站 | 国产天堂 | 国产视频高清在线观看 | 欧美一区视频 | 深夜做爰性大片中文 | 亚洲精品午夜国产va久久成人 | 欧美一级毛级毛片 | 国产精品久久网 | 中文国产成人精品久久一区 | 久久www免费人成精品 | 欧美在线香蕉在线现视频 | 加勒比一本大道香蕉在线视频 | 偷偷操不一样的久久 | 久久精品爱国产免费久久 | 欧美黄免在线播放 | 全免费a级毛片免费看 | 国内精品自产拍在线观看91 | 成人黄色在线视频 | 亚洲高清国产一区二区三区 | 久久成人精品 | 国产女人在线观看 | 最新精品亚洲成a人在线观看 | 亚洲精品天堂自在久久77 | 中文字幕一区二区三区 精品 | 韩国黄色一级毛片 | 视频一区视频二区在线观看 | 日日碰碰 | 国产成人精品系列在线观看 | 亚洲天堂黄 | 亚洲最大黄网 |