On many occasions I have been standing in a queue in a branch of HSBC and other banks in Hong Kong and have seen someone depositing huge amounts of cash.
For example, once I saw a mainlander emptying a bag full of HK$1,000 notes. I estimated he must have had millions of dollars.
Letter to the editor, July 20
When was the last time you used a HK$1,000 banknote for a normal, everyday transaction?
I can't recall having done so in years. If I ever offered one in payment I'm sure I would have apologised for it first and made the plea that it is all I had in my wallet. If I did it to a taxi driver he would still have sworn at me. An ATM machine once spat one at me. I went straight back into the branch and asked for some real money in exchange.
Here is an interesting statistic for you. At the end of last year, HK$1,000 banknotes accounted for 55.9 per cent of the total value of banknotes in circulation, the highest ratio I could find on record. There was HK$145 billion worth of them, more than three times as much as in the late 1990s.
There is a simple explanation for this, of course. The HK$1,000 banknote is the money launderer's currency of choice when cleaning up Hong Kong dollar cash. You can carry quite a sum of money that way in a roll in your pocket.