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Strategies & Market Trends : Asia Forum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Paul Berliner who wrote (5720)	8/20/1998 1:04:00 PM
From: Sam	Respond to of 9980

Paul, Thanks for posting the AFR article on HK. Jeez, now where will the economists go for their example of "pure capitalism"? The article is worth reading in its entirety, but below, I post a brief excerpt for personal use only, as it is copyrighted: The true guilty parties are Hong Kong's property barons and the cartels that are permitted to control key sectors of the economy, including utilities and even supermarket chains - the Government last year ruling out the introduction of the competition requirements that apply in most other markets. No wonder Lo Ka-shui, chairman of the Real Estate Developers Association, cheered the Government's intervention "to protect the local economy from speculators". An extraordinarily ironic remark given the failure of governments, in British and Chinese eras, to protect the economy against the scarcely restrained greed of property speculators, which has done most to destroy the territory's competitiveness. The sharemarket has come to be dominated by the property sector. And the Government depends on property revenues rather than income or company taxes. Consequently the Government has moved to protect the industry, and its own long-term cash flow, by suspending land sales until next March.