Hong Kong's 1967 lesson: Move fast to win Asia's rich in dollar turmoil

Hong Kong must expand yuan-denominated options to attract asset inflows, leveraging its liquidity edge over Singapore in the race for wealthy investors

By Andy Mukherjee

 

Although the dollar’s free fall may have stopped for now, Donald Trump’s trade war has left many analysts skeptical of its long-term viability as a haven. The first question in Asia is, how will the wealthy respond? The second: Where will they park their capital, Singapore or Hong Kong? 

A previous generation of the affluent Chinese diaspora, which had made its money in resources like rubber, sugar, palm oil, and tin before and during World War II, stormed out of the British pound after its 1967 devaluation, choosing to leave behind a fading imperial master to embrace the preeminent post-colonial superpower.

 

Trump’s policies have thrust a similar decision on their progeny and the nouveau rich: real-estate moguls, startup billionaires, deep-pocketed dealmakers, and industrial tycoons. Singapore and Hong Kong extend generous tax breaks to family offices, or vehicles through which the uber-prosperous manage their investments. Both centers also offer cash-for-residency pathways. 

 

To see which one of them may have an upper hand, consider first the historical record, before taking into account what’s different now.

 

In 1968, Singapore emerged as the No. 1 choice for Asian tycoons to execute their currency shift. That’s because the city-state, eager to chart an independent economic destiny after its separation from Malaysia, quickly set up an Asian dollar market with the help of Dick van Oenen, a Dutch trader at Bank of America.

 

It was essentially a separate set of ledgers in which banks recorded cross-border transfers into dollar-denominated assets during Asian trading hours. A more laissez-faire Hong Kong should have been the preferred venue for this business, but as Oxford historian Catherine Schenk has shown, it entered the contest too late because of resistance from bankers and local authorities; they feared outflows of local liquidity. 

 

The Singapore market grew with the influx of petrodollars in the 1970s. Even now, despite the huge wealth creation at Hong Kong’s doorstep since China began to open up, intra-Asian movement of personal assets remains almost equally divided between the two financial centers. 

 

Expect some of the inertia to carry on: Indian family offices’ list of preferred locations will more likely continue to include Singapore, alongside London and Dubai — all cities with significant populations of nonresident Indians.

 

But Hong Kong will offer a compelling investment case. Should the trade war intensify, and US-listed Chinese stocks such as Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. and Baidu Inc. are forced to delist, the only way to access them — as well as automotive powerhouses like BYD Co. and promising AI startups like Zhipu — may be via Hong Kong and its links with onshore markets on the mainland. For similar reasons, Indonesian money, which has tended to favor Singapore over Hong Kong by 2:1, might also look more favorably toward the Chinese special administrative region. 

 

The yuan’s limited convertibility is a hurdle, and a possibility of its devaluation a near-term risk.

 

But these aren’t showstoppers in the long run. As I wrote recently, the greenback’s monopoly in payments is already threatened. Digital currencies may be able to bypass the dollar to settle cross-border financial claims where neither party has a direct interest in American money. Hong Kong, which has opened its securities-regulation tent to accommodate tokenized assets, may be able to lure the rich to keep their crypto in custody with the city’s banks.

 

Trump’s trade policies, even if substantially reversed, have sent a loud message to the Asian affluent classes. For all its post-World War II prosperity, America is no longer keen to continue with a system in which it habitually buys more goods from the rest of the world than it sells, and pays for the difference by hawking assets. If Washington doesn’t want its money to be a haven, then Asians have to look for alternatives. 

 

Despite the recent bounce, bearish dollar moves are “structural,” according to Bloomberg Intelligence. “Highly uncertain tariff policies and the associated question marks hovering around US economic exceptionalism are contributing to an acceleration of de-dollarization,” note analysts Audrey Childe-Freeman and Thinh Nguyen.

 

A corollary for Hong Kong as a financial center is that it will need to give plenty of yuan-denominated options to those parking their assets in the city. A deep pool of liquidity in the Chinese currency will be its advantage over Singapore. It may also be time, as my colleague Shuli Ren has argued, to start behind-the-scenes preparations to bring an orderly end to the local currency’s dollar peg. In the late 1960s, the then British-run city was slow to latch on to the switch away from the pound; six decades later, the greenback mustn’t come in the way of its fight for flows.  (Disclaimer: This is a Bloomberg Opinion piece, and these are the personal opinions of the writer. They do not reflect the views of www.business-standard.com or the Business Standard newspaper)