HK rmb debt market plan test for yuan
(Reuters)
Updated: 2006-02-22 17:32

Beijing dropped the yuan's long-standing peg against the dollar in July, and has long said it would eventually make the currency freely convertible.

PILOT SCHEME

Economists said Hong Kong was the logical choice for monitoring how the yuan would respond to market forces.

James Malcolm, a currency strategist with Deutsche Bank in Singapore, said it made sense to launch a pilot scheme in Hong Kong, where Beijing can keep close track of it, but he described it as just an incremental step towards liberalisation.

"It's like an incubator for experiments. It'll start very very small," Malcolm said.

"In the longer term, they plan to open the capital account," said Bank of East Asia economist Paul Tang. "It makes sense to do it on a small scale in Hong Kong."

The immediate impact of such a market would be more localised, providing an investment outlet for the nearly $3 billion worth of individual yuan deposits that have accumulated since Hong Kong's banks were allowed to take them in early 2004.

Yuan deposits in 38 Hong Kong banks hit 22.6 billion yuan ($2.8 billion) at the end of 2005; spending and cash withdrawals in 2005 using yuan-denominated bank cards reached HK$9.4 billion.

Economists said prospective issuers of yuan debt included Hong Kong-based or foreign firms that exported to Chinese mainland and thus raked in yuan-denominated revenue, and also investors that owned Chinese-based assets such as factories.