One country, two stock markets no longer?
• 05 Apr 2014
Investors are excited at the prospect of mutual access to the Hong Kong and Shanghai stock exchanges, but Breakingview's Peter Thal Larsen expects a slow flow of funds rather than a big bang (Reuters)
Mutual market access between China and Hong Kong, it would be a very big bang
Reuters - China and Hong Kong will give each other mutual access to their markets. Now if this is true, it is big news. But we've heard this song before.The Hong Kong exchange has said that even though there are talks going on with Shanghai, there's nothing really happened yet. there's been a lot of discussion for many years about the possibility of allowing Chinese investors to buy shares in Hong Kong and also allowing investors in Hong Kong to buy shares on the mainland. If that were to happen, that would be a big deal, but there are many reasons why it hasn't happened yet. And the main reason is that if you allow Chinese investors to take their money out of Hong Kong by buying shares, you would essentially be opening up China's capital account. And that is something that China has said it wants to do in the long term, but is not something that it's about to do any time soon.