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• Rich - Oct 14 2008 | the, hong kong, economy, Banks and Banking

  Interesting offer from HK - it will back all of its banks' deposits, prompting reasonable questions about what happens if the world's richest people put their money into an HK bank that collapses.

  My friends called me a few weeks back and told me about the run on the bank that occurred. Turns out it happened due to rumors that circulated via text messages. The HK "FDIC" insures deposits there up to $100,000HKD, or about $13000.

  Quoted:Li Kui-wai, the director of the Asian economic policy center at the City University of Hong Kong, said that Hong Kong’s history of attracting deposits from all over the world meant that the policy initiatives announced on Tuesday could prove costly. He questioned if the Hong Kong government and taxpayer could afford a bailout “if the one million richest people in the world put their money in a Hong Kong bank, and the bank goes broke.” Hong Kong’s action could put pressure on other international financial centers with very large deposits and limited populations that have not yet issued blanket guarantees of bank deposits, like Switzerland, which has roughly the same population as Hong Kong at about 7 million people. Hong Kong will back up its deposit guarantee with its foreign exchange reserves, now $161 billion.