《香港溫布頓》- 蔡東豪

Wimbledon HK《香港溫布頓》- 蔡東豪

I knew this book from Mingpao website and this book was also read by 曾俊華.

It is an inspiring book which tells how the author thinks about maintaining the status of financial centre of Asia and overcoming the challenges. With the unique opinions of the author, readers can know more about the prospect of HK financial market.

The author is actually quite positive about HK's future although Chinese government intends to boost Shanghai as another financial centre. However, the general environment in China is now still immature (i.e. government policies, controls over the financial market ( the over-intervention in the stock market harms the basic rules of market mechanism)and the quality of investors, conflicts of interest ). Thus, HK can still take a free ride of the boom of economy in China.

How to maintain the status of financial centre and overcome the challenges:

1) attract more foreign talents to HK financial market

2) protect and improve the brand of our financial centre status by enforcing fair & strict internal controls to differentiate ourselves from Shanghai

3) accept the " Wimbledon effect"

The author promotes the market mechanism ( efficient/self-regulated market with few government interventions) and he thinks that protectionism is the emeny of economic growth ( the name of the book includes the word " Wimbledon", it refers to " Wimbledon effect" - Britain holds the well-known tennis competition in Wimbledon every year but rarely one british won the competition. However, this competition brings huge capitals, employment oppportunities. This reminds me of the phrase " the winner in the curse" ) With reference to this phenomenon og the London global financial centre status, the top financial institutions are foreign companies since they indirectly raise the quality and bring new ideas to London financial market

4) maintain the fair game rules of the financial market >" survival for the fittest", one can get reasonable rewards according to his ability > so the phenomenon of wide gap between "Haves" and "Have-Nots"(i.e. wealth gap) should not blame on the fair financial market and government should not hamper the growth of financial market with the excuse of wealth allocation ( you rarely see a mediocre with a brilliant family background survives in multi-national investment bank)

5) maintain a mature and "energetic" stock market with high liquidity, huge and fast info flow

6) simple-structured financial products can reduce unneccessary risk

I remember Prof. Wong said that bond market is not popular in HK because we all like gambling :) The author gives me a new insight > government and entreprises do not have a culture to issue bonds, banks can already earn a lot of money relying on the property industry and it is no need to rely on high risk debitors...therefore, the supply ( from banks) is suppressed.

As for the inactive commoditiy market, HK is not the place of production/ agglomeration, the investors are also unfamiliar with it.

7) improve the fairness of financial market >replace the primitive method with electronic method when buying IPO stocks ( some cornerstone investors just pay one or two days before getting the new shares but general public needs to pay 3 weeks in advanced) >it is hard to change as banks can get a huge profit in margin lending

This video is a short summary of the book

http://www.rthk.org.hk/special/awardpro/award07/onhongkong_tsoi.htm