Famous US investor Paul Tudor Jones has argued in a recent letter to investors that the US government should force a de-pegging of the RMB and Hong Kong dollar from the US dollar.
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This casts doubt on the peg which links the value of Hong Kong's currency to the dollar.
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Financial markets shared Wall Street's relief that Brazil was not digging in for a protracted battle over its currency, and there was no sign of a speculative attack against the Hong Kong dollar.
They have also been more reluctant than others to cut interest rates or to let their exchange rates fall or less able, in the case of Hong Kong, whose currency is pegged to the dollar.
After big depreciations in other Asian countries, it is the fear that the Hong Kong dollar is now overvalued that triggered much of the current panic.
Through his children, he was introduced to Steven Hanke, an American economist who believes that the way to restore confidence in Indonesia's economy is through pegging the rupiah to the dollar by means of a currency board, as Hong Kong, Argentina, Bulgaria and others do.
The Hong Kong dollar is kept pegged to the U.S. dollar, a recipe for distortion of economic activity in the current hot-and-cold international climate.
The yen traded near 96.6685 against the dollar as of 5:07p.m. in Hong Kong.
HSBC, a London-based banking group with large interests in Hong Kong, switched its reporting from sterling to American dollars on the ground that the majority of its revenues are in the greenback or currencies linked to it, such as the Hong Kong dollar.
It could be the Hong Kong Bank of China, a private commercial bank, which is already issuing dollar-linked banknotes in Hong Kong, which circulate alongside banknotes from the government and other private banks.
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An attack on its currency, the last in Asia still linked to the U.S. dollar, raised fears that Hong Kong would follow the rest of Southeast Asia into financial meltdown.
In principle, of course, there was no reason for this to affect the Hong Kong dollar.
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This does not mean that either the Hong Kong dollar or the yuan are out of the woods.
The Gulf States of the Middle East and Malaysia also have a dollar peg, as does Hong Kong, Macau and, surprisingly, Venezuela and Lebanon.
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"The two biggest risks would be a 'meltdown' in Japan and a depreciation in the Hong Kong dollar or renminbi sparking off a further round of devaluations, " says Alan Brown of State Street Global Advisors in London.
Hong Kong, one of the few Asian countries to maintain a fixed parity to the dollar, spent the summer intervening in its stock market to defend its currency link.
The Hong Kong dollar's peg would probably give way, too, leading to another round of competitive devaluations across the region.
Those that are fixed by governments notably the Hong Kong dollar and the Chinese yuan have simply drawn greater speculation about the effect of future speculation.
Speculative hedge funds - "crocodiles, " Tsang calls them - had attacked the Hong Kong dollar's peg to the U.S. greenback several times since the start of the Asian Financial Crisis.
Some money-watchers have suggested that while Hong Kong continues to publicly stand by the linked-exchange rate peg of its currency to the U.S. dollar, behind the scenes it may be looking for alternatives.
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