Word: honge
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...slump in exports has pretty grim implications for the country's manufacturing boomtowns, and the pain is already being felt. Stanley Lau, deputy chairman of the Federation of Hong Kong Industries, estimates that export orders at some 70,000 factories owned by Hong Kong companies in southern China have declined 5%-10% this year compared with 2007. Recent months have seen a first wave of bankruptcies and closures among the tens of thousands of factories in industrial zones from Guangzhou to Shanghai that make toys, jeans and PCs bound for U.S. retailers...
...being made worse by the worldwide credit crunch. Nervous banks, Lau says, have reduced the credit lines of many small manufacturers by up to 50%, starving them of operating funds. Letters of credit, which facilitate the shipment of exports, were once automatically accepted by banks in Hong Kong, but now they are being held until bankers are sure funds are coming from overseas, so payments to manufacturers for their products are being delayed. As a result, Lau says he expects that 20% of China's Hong Kong-owned factories, which employ 10 million people, could be shut down by early...
...total of $100 billion and to inject a further $30 billion into financial markets. The steps are aimed at alleviating growing difficulties Korean banks have faced getting U.S. dollar financing from skittish international banks. Korea's move followed the lead of other Asian governments. Last week, Hong Kong, Singapore and Malaysia guaranteed all bank deposits, part of a larger effort to rebuild confidence in financial markets. A half dozen Asian central banks, including China's, have cut interest rates in recent weeks. Central banks have also taken action to boost liquidity...
...measures appear to have helped unlock frozen credit markets. The three-month Hong Kong interbank rate, or HIBOR, a measure of the difficulties of getting access to credit, fell by more than half a percentage point Monday, the biggest drop in a decade...
...That language scarcely matches the drama of the world financial crisis, but it did at least contribute to the modest optimism with which markets have attacked a new week of trading. Japan's Nikkei index climbed 3.6%, Hong Kong's Hang Seng rose 5.3%, and South Korea's Kospi jumped for the first time in a week: a 2.3% hike inspired in part by a $130 billion government assistance plan for banks announced in Seoul on Sunday...