The claim that Hong Kong has become a relic of an international financial center cannot be substantiated.
Finance is built on trust. Hong Kong’s institutional strengths, built up over decades, will not disappear over night. The key going forward lies in being able to maintain or even strengthen the confidence and trust the market has built up for Hong Kong.
Author: GUDORDI | 2026-05-06
金融的基石是信任。
Finance is based on trust.——約翰·摩根
（John Pierpont Morgan, 1837-1913）
In the previous article, the author has discussed the four most important variables that will determine the future of Hong Kong as an international financial center. After the article was published, some friends asked: does Hong Kong’s international financial center status still have a future?
The final outcome depends on how the four major parameters are being handled.
A simple answer is that the potential certainly exists. The final outcome will depend on how participants in Hong Kong’s market handle the four major parameters mentioned earlier — especially whether, in addressing them, they can also grasp the opportunities associated with the inevitable transformations in the global political, economic, and monetary system, along with the potentials and challenges these changes may bring to both the industry as a whole and Hong Kong itself.
Basically, the development of most things in the world often involves positive and negative factors both coexisting and evolving dynamically. Often, the balance are like 50–50, 80–20, or 30–70; and situations of 100–0 or 0–100 are extremely rare. Regarding the future of Hong Kong as an international financial center, what can be stated with certainty is that the balance related to positive and negative factors are definitely not 0–100. As such, the earlier widely discussed claim that ‘Hong Kong has already become the ruins of an international financial center’ is certainly overly arbitrary, to say the least.
The author also questions whether those who first proposed such views were making impartial judgments purely based on objective logical reasoning, or whether, in some sense, they were merely venting emotions or reflecting more complex mindsets. At the same time, the author doubts how deeply those holding such views truly understand the development of the global political, economic, monetary, and financial system since World War II, as well as Hong Kong’s journey in bringing its capital market onto the international stage.
In the earlier article, ‘Does Hong Kong Need to Care Whether It Is an International Financial Center Relic?’, the author mentioned that the best response Hong Kong people could give to such claims is simply to laugh them off — and this view has not changed. Of course, concerns raised by the market should not be easily dismssed. However, it is equally important to note, as FA Hayek has pointed out, that the market’s true opinion can only be reflected through actions backed by real money. The interpretations offered by the media and financial markets on many issues may not necessarily be representative of those of actual market participants; the direction and significance of those interpretations may also vary from person to person. Ultimately, the actions taken by market participants are usually the result of weighing many factors together, making it difficult for us to draw conclusions based on one or two factors only.
香港的國金中心事業是建基於以往數十年跟世界各地交往建立的制度和積累。（Shuttlestock）
The key lies in how to ensure that market trust can continue to accumulate and strengthen.
As quoted at the beginning of this article from the American financial titan J. P. Morgan: ‘Finance is based on Trust.’ And an important component of trust is experience. In essence, market trust is often built gradually, piece by piece, through accumulated experiences over a prolonged period of time. It cannot be established overnight, but neither can it disappear instantly.
It is worth noting that Hong Kong’s development — from a fishing village to a trading port, then to a manufacturing center and later a commercial services hub — was achieved step by step through its own efforts. Therefore, behind Hong Kong’s status as an international financial center lies not only national policy support, but also decades of its own institutional development and what it has accumulated along the way. Have such inheritance not exist, it probably would not have been able to grow so rapidly between 1999 and 2019. As such, even if a demise of Hong Kong were to occur, it would still take a considerable amount of time to fully unfold. In this sense, strictly speaking, the claim that Hong Kong has become a ‘relic’ of an international financial center is somewhat absurd.
In any case, Hong Kong’s international financial center status is built upon the trust resulting from the evolution and development of its own financial and other institutions, as well as the accumulated experiences and collective memories of all the market participants around the world through interacting with people in the city over the last few decades. Seen in this light, the most important task for Hong Kong is to ensure that existing trust can continue to be maintained, while trust that has not yet been established can keep expanding and deepening.
Of course, the essence of a free market is that participants may decide, based on their own knowledge, experience, and judgment, whether their trust in something should continue, decrease, or increase. However, as long as the market remains sufficiently broad and deep, fluctuations in market confidence of a certain scale should be manageable. After all, the development of an international financial center is measured in decades, or even centuries.
In fact, the maturity of financial markets is often achieved through successfully confronting and resolving one crisis after another. Over the past several decades, every wave of pessimism claiming that Hong Kong had no future was ultimately proven excessive by subsequent developments. Of course, Hong Kong’s resilience in the past does not guarantee that it will continue indefinitely, but it does at least suggest that we should avoid drawing premature conclusions.
The speech delivered by the King of England in the U.S. Congress may offer important insights.
Perhaps everything will still depend on how Hong Kong’s market participants handle the four major variables mentioned earlier — especially the transformations in the global political, economic, monetary, and industrial landscape, and the opportunities and challenges these changes may bring to both the industry as a whole and Hong Kong itself.
On this issue, the author was deeply struck by the speech recently delivered by Charles III during his visit to the United States at the United States Congress. The author feels that King Charles III, with great skill, touched upon many issues of great importance to the United Kingdom, the United States, and even the entire world — as well as the underlying logic behind these developments — in a manner that seemed casual, humorous, and somewhat self-deprecating.
The author believes that among the most important themes were the nature of trust and the source of institutional resilience, and also believes that Hong Kong may find valuable lessons and inspiration from them. The author will discuss this further later.
