Financial Market & Real Estate

Dubai has pushed Hong Kong’s port out of the number 10 place. The shuffle reflects the rapidly declining fortunes of the port, once the world’s busiest.

Last week, Morgan Stanley and HSBC cut dozens of jobs in the Asia & Pacific region, with at least 80 percent from mainland China and Hong Kong.

On April 10, the private office website of Mr. Maktoum, a ‘Dubai prince’ who promised to invest in HK was inaccessible. His personal LinkedIn account also disap

‘The most important thing to become an international financial center is trust from the United States,’ Takafumi Maki, a Japanese financial professional, wrote.

Factors driving away tourists and local spenders alike include the ’mainlandization' of the city, high prices, and Hong Kong’s CCP-controlled administration.

For one major shipping alliance between Maersk and Hapag-Lloyd, Hong Kong is not long featuring as a direct port at all.

Stephen Roach, former Morgan Stanley Asia chair, said he was prohibited from expressing differing opinions on Hong Kong at the recent China Development Forum.

With the exodus of foreign capital and the contraction of the financial industry, Hong Kong may only serve as an emigration springboard for Chinese talents.

‘It may reflect a decrease in foreign currencies, especially U.S. dollars, in the balance of the banking system, so we see such arrangements by banks.’

“If Mainland China goes down, Hong Kong goes down,” he told The Epoch Times, adding that the current measures would not change the direction of property prices.

While his opinion has triggered a strong reaction among some, the city’s indexes of real estate, finance, and other areas have corroborated what he’s said.

“It took British 150 years to turn Hong Kong into an international financial center, while China [the CCP] only took two years to turn Singapore into one.”

High interest rates and political uncertainty in Hong Kong is likely to cause prime residential prices to fall more than 10 percent this year.

This may eventually lead to financial difficulties or even closure of companies, economic recession, and layoffs...