Tag: Currency

Mainland Chinese Flocked to Hong Kong’s Top Talent Visa

Media Library

To some foreign expatriates, Hong Kong has lost its appeal as an international city and no longer feels like home since Beijing took a heavier hand in its governance. But for many former mainland Chinese like Angelina Wang, it has become a more attractive place to live and work. Ms. Wang, in her early 30s, was feeling stuck in her job at a state-owned finance company in Shenzhen, a mainland city just across the border, when she read about a Hong Kong visa for professional workers. She quickly applied. As…

As China’s Markets Stumble, Japan Rises Toward Record

Media Library

There’s a shift underway in Asia that’s reverberating through global financial markets. Japan’s stock market, overlooked by investors for decades, is making a furious comeback. The benchmark Nikkei 225 index is edging closer to the record it set on Dec. 29, 1989, which effectively marked the peak of Japan’s economic ascendancy before a collapse that led to decades of low growth. China, long an impossible-to-ignore market, has been spiraling downward. Stocks in China recently touched lows not seen since a rout in 2015, and Hong Kong’s Hang Seng Index was…

Gold Bars and Tokyo Apartments: How Money Is Flowing Out of China.

Media Library

Affluent Chinese have moved hundreds of billions of dollars out of the country this year, seizing on the end of Covid precautions that had almost completely sealed China’s borders for nearly three years. They are using their savings to buy overseas apartments, stocks and insurance policies. Able to fly again to Tokyo, London and New York, Chinese travelers have bought apartments in Japan and poured money into accounts in the United States or Europe that pay higher interest than in China, where rates are low and falling. The outbound shift…

Pan Gongsheng Named Head of Chinese Central Bank

Media Library

For nearly eight years Pan Gongsheng has overseen one of the world’s biggest pots of money: China’s $3 trillion in foreign currency reserves. Now he will run the country’s central bank, playing an even more powerful role in the Chinese economy. Mr. Pan, a prominent economist, was named on Tuesday as governor of the central bank, the People’s Bank of China. He had already been installed as the bank’s Communist Party secretary on July 1. It will be the first time in five years that one person will hold both…

Businesses Brace for Currency Chaos in Asia

Chin@Strategy

Tigun Wibisana and Sandra Kok, who own the SiTigun cafe on Penang Island in Malaysia, are facing an excruciating decision that could make or break their business of 14 years: Can they increase prices to cover rising expenses without driving customers into the arms of their bigger rivals? The cost of the coffee beans that the couple, who are married, buy is spiraling because they are traded globally in U.S. dollars, and the Malaysian ringgit has fallen to a 24-year low. Compound that with an inflationary spike in prices for…

Gold Ingots From 18th-Century Shipwreck Returned to France

Chin@Strategy

The seas were high and the fog was thick in December 1746 when the Prince de Conty, a French frigate returning home from China with tea, ceramics and roughly 100 gold ingots, foundered in the Atlantic, just 10 miles from shore. Its bounty sank beneath the waves and laid untouched for 228 years until 1974, when treasure hunters located the wreck and illegally scavenged its remains. On Wednesday, five of the gold ingots, embossed with Chinese characters and valued at $231,000, were returned to the French Embassy in Washington, ending…