[I second to this<g>]--"Hong Kong’s Tsang pushes
for single Asian currency"
BOAO, China: Hong Kong’s caretaker leader Donald Tsang said on Saturday that there was an “overwhelming” case for a single Asian currency, but that the objective had to be attained step-by-step.
“The case for a single Asian currency is overwhelming,” he told a gathering of businesspeople, officials and academics in the south Chinese resort town of Boao, but added: “We must learn to walk before we can run.”
“If there is a sense of Asian unity, then a single Asian currency can either facilitate that Asian unity or become a means toward that end. But unfortunately, life is not that simple,” he said.
Tsang pointed out that the vast diversity of the Asian economies made it an extremely difficult task to bring about a single currency in the region, but that governments also needed to do more to bring the region together.
“We must first create the conditions for greater free trade in financial services before we can even begin to talk about monetary integration and cooperation,” he said.
Tsang urged Asian governments to remove hurdles to increased trade in financial services as a first step toward the eventual objective of a single currency in Asia.
“Asia has unwittingly erected regulatory barriers against trade with each other in a variety of financial products,” he said.
“We have the irony of growing free trade in physical goods, but relatively little trade in financial products within Asia.”
For example, it is easier for a bond listed on the Irish Stock Exchange to be traded within Asia than it is for a Hong Kong mutual fund to be permitted to be traded in any of the Asian markets or vice versa, he said.
“Asia is strong in manufactures and natural resources, but relatively weak in financial services,” he said.
“We are dominated by large domestic banking systems, our capital markets remain fragmented and we have not yet begun to build strong retirement and social security funds to provide for our ageing populations,” he said.
Tsang was speaking at the Boao Forum for Asia, an annual economic gathering that Beijing hopes to develop into a regional parallel to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
--AFP
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