Jake's View | Opinion: Easy scapegoats beget wrong solutions for our housing woes
Hong Kong’s housing market is strong because our currency is pegged to the dollar, and thus held hostage to artificially low US interest rates. Speculators may be easy scapegoats but they have little, in fact nothing, to do with rising prices.
As it takes time for new supply to materialise, the government also introduced several rounds of demand-side management measures to address market exuberance. These measures have achieved notable success.
--Joyce Kok, Principal Assistant Secretary for Transport & Housing,
Letters to the editor, May 2
A notable success indeed. The latest figures show residential prices up an average of 18 per cent from a year ago. Was that what you had in mind, madam?
It won’t do to argue that this is just an anomaly and that the earlier dip in prices from mid-2015 to early 2016 is evidence that the government’s anti-speculation measures have worked.
That earlier dip was the result of the sympathetic effects of a crash on the Shanghai stock market and weak financial markets in the United States, because many investors believed US interest rates would soon be put on a pronounced upward trend.