Hong Kong Stock Market Quotes

South-east Asia’s high savings rates, most of which flowed into bank deposits, lent themselves to outsize banking systems, which invited godfather abuse. There is, in turn, a pretty direct line from the insider manipulation of regional banks to the Asian financial crisis. The ‘over-banked’ nature of south-east Asia also helps explain a conundrum that has occupied some of the region’s equity investors: why, despite heady economic growth, have long-term stock market returns in south-east Asia been so poor? Since 1993, when a flood of foreign money increased capitalisation in regional markets by around 2.5 times in one calendar year,37 dollar-denominated returns with dividends reinvested (what investors call ‘total’ returns) in every regional market have been lower than those in the mature markets of New York and London, and a fraction of those in other emerging markets in eastern Europe and Latin America.38

The widely mis-interpreted 1998 'meltdown' of East Asia was a financial symptom of the renewed reality: In fact, it was the first round the world recession again to begin in East Asia and spread from there to the West, instead of vice versa. That marked the beginnings of the return back 360 degrees around the world of the world economic center to Asia where it had always been before those two eighty-year period of temporary Western ascendance. The stock market crash in Hong Kong and the devaluation of the Thai baht and the Indonesian rupia took only 80 seconds to make themselves felt in the London City and on New York's Wall Street. How much of a cultural lag do we still need for popular perception and social theory to catch up with global reality?

Moreover, as much as a third of China’s reported FDI may in fact be “round-tripping”—investments by Chinese individuals and companies that are routed through companies in other jurisdictions, especially Hong Kong. Until about 2005, there was a strong incentive for round-tripping in order to capture tax breaks and other benefits reserved for foreign firms. Even as those preferences were phased out, other reasons for round-tripping remained. Some Chinese companies—such as Internet giants Alibaba and Tencent—are classified as “foreign” firms because they have set up offshore holding company structures in order to list on international stock markets. It may be that some investments of these firms wind up counted as “FDI.”11