By: fcoa on Lunedì 05 Novembre 2007 12:31
Hong Kong Peg Is a Code Alibaba Couldn't Break: Andy Mukherjee
By Andy Mukherjee
Nov. 5 (Bloomberg) -- For a while, it looked as if the initial public offer of Alibaba.com Ltd. in Hong Kong would end up becoming ``Open Sesame'' for the territory's pegged currency.
Investors needed Hong Kong dollars to order shares in the Chinese Internet company's $1.5 billion IPO, the biggest for an Internet company since Google Inc.'s 2004 offer.
And Alibaba was just one of the 33 companies that sought a total sum of HK$69 billion ($8.9 billion) last month from overeager investors. This demand for Hong Kong stock worsened a demand-supply mismatch in the city's currency.
On Oct. 26 and again on Oct. 31, the Hong Kong dollar tested the upper end of its trading range, which allows the currency to fluctuate between 7.75 and 7.85 to the U.S. dollar with 7.80 as the midpoint. The 24-year-old linked exchange rate came under pressure, though it didn't break down. And chances are it won't, at least not in the foreseeable future.
To be sure, keeping the peg won't be a free lunch.
If the U.S. Federal Reserve further pares the cost of money to deal with the impact on the economy of the housing-market collapse, Hong Kong will be in an unenviable situation: To save the peg, it will have to pump more liquidity into the banking system, stoking an asset-market frenzy that the city has borrowed from China. Prudence suggests the opposite course: Hong Kong should abandon its dollar fixation and raise domestic rates.
But when the city didn't give up the linked-rate regime in the bad times, why should it dismantle it in the good times?
Easy to Defend
When Hong Kong was hit by the Asian crisis in 1998, the government bought HK$30 million of stocks every minute for two days to save the currency from getting pummeled, say Credit Suisse economists Dong Tao and Christiaan Tuntono in Hong Kong.
Compared with that, the only cost of reining in a strengthening currency is to flood banks with Hong Kong dollars. That's just what the Hong Kong Monetary Authority did recently when it bought U.S. dollars, pushing up the aggregate balance in banks' clearing accounts to HK$10.6 billion on Nov. 2, from HK$1.3 billion on Oct. 23.
By Nov. 2, Hong Kong dollar interest rates had fallen to their lowest level in 1 1/2 months when compared with U.S. dollar deposits. The 12-month forward rate for the currency eased to 7.7156 to the dollar, from 7.7090 on Oct. 31.
``It is much easier to defend the strong end of the peg than the weak end,'' the Credit Suisse economists say.
Good Times
Scrapping the peg may invite even more speculative capital into Hong Kong as the prospect of currency appreciation provides foreign investors with a further incentive to buy local assets.
There's no reason why dismantling the currency's dollar link should be high on the political agenda in either Beijing or Hong Kong. After all, this isn't the Chinese yuan we're talking about: No one's shouting ``manipulation'' here.
Meanwhile, retail sales in Hong Kong are booming. Inflation, at a five-month high of 1.6 percent, is still tame when compared with neighboring China.
The middle class in Hong Kong is happy because the tax on salaries will be cut to 15 percent next year. The poor are being wooed with an extension in free education: to 12 years of schooling, from nine now.
The rich in Hong Kong are feeling richer: Prices of luxury apartments on Hong Kong island have almost doubled in the past four years. Everyone's having a party and with eyes welling with tears -- so bad is the pollution imported from the mainland -- thanking China for the good times.
`Great Leap Outward'
Hong Kong is the prime beneficiary of what Jing Ulrich, a JPMorgan Chase & Co. analyst in Hong Kong, calls China's ``Great Leap Outward.''
Since September, $16 billion has been raised in China for outbound investment by the so-called Qualified Domestic Institutional Investors -- banks, asset managers and insurance companies. A big chunk of this money is heading for Hong Kong.
On Aug. 20, China announced a pilot program to allow individuals on the mainland to directly invest in the island's stock market. Since then, the stock market index in Hong Kong has risen 42 percent. The `H' shares, or Hong Kong-traded Chinese equities, have run up a jaw-dropping 64 percent, the world's best-performing benchmark in this two-month period.
In these bountiful times, Hong Kong gains little from upsetting the peg, an anchor of stability that cements its position as an international financial center and makes it a natural choice for companies such as Alibaba to raise capital.
What happens in case the U.S. dollar tanks and the Hong Kong currency, tied to it, loses its international purchasing power? Hong Kong may have found a clever solution to that, too.
Just as silver lost the race to gold in late 19th century as a store of value, the Hong Kong dollar may one day bow out to the weightier yuan, already a limited legal tender in the city.
``May the best currency win,'' says Stephen Jen, Morgan Stanley's global head of currency research in London.
The city's mini-constitution, the Basic Law, insists that the Hong Kong dollar ``shall continue to circulate.'' But what if no one feels like using it as money? That's the real question surrounding the future of the Hong Kong dollar. The peg may survive, the currency might not.