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Banks print millions of new notes to ensure lai see packets are stuffed for holidays

A desire for crisp new dollar bills to stuff red envelopes for the Lunar New Year will see hundreds of millions of notes withdrawn from the city's banks ahead of the holiday.

A desire for crisp new dollar bills to stuff red envelopes for the Lunar New Year will see hundreds of millions of notes withdrawn from the city's banks ahead of the holiday.

Each year, 300 to 400 million new and "good-as-new" notes were issued by banks in response to festival-related demand, the Monetary Authority said.

Red envelopes, known as where most of this cash will end up, are given to relatives and employees during the first 15 days of the Lunar New Year.

The preference for new bills in was symbolic, said Joseph Bosco, an associate professor of anthropology at Chinese University. "In this context, by putting it in a red envelope, it's in a sense clean, sanitised," Bosco said. "In fact people want new money just to remove the value aspect of it, to make it more like a gift."

He added that giving money as a gift was a longstanding tradition in Chinese culture, unlike in the West where it might be avoided. "The Chinese have been commercialised since the Song dynasty, so giving money is not a problem like it is in more recent times in Europe," he said.

Hong Kong's three note-issuing banks - HSBC, Standard Chartered and Bank of China - declined to give the total value of the notes that would be made available to customers during the week preceding the festival.

About 45 per cent of the notes withdrawn by customers are "good-as-new", a category introduced to reduce the environmental toll of printing new bills.

The city's dollar bills have an average life span of four to six years, with the smaller denominations removed from circulation more frequently.

The direct impact of cash on Hong Kong's economy was difficult to assess, Chinese University economics professor Terence Chong Tai-leung said.

"I would say that this lump sum of red packet money is actually very little; it's not enough to boost consumption," he said.

Chong said the annual giving of lucky money was no windfall for the city. "Every family has to save up and reduce their reserve to give money to other people," Chong said. "It's just like gambling; I win, you lose, and the winner makes more money and the loser just a little bit less."

Retail spending in January 2014, when the Lunar New Year period fell last year, stood at HK$54.5 billion, the Census and Statistics Department said.

Mr Ng, 64, said he withdrew cash from the ATM to cover the HK$10,000 he planned to give in red envelopes to relatives and friends for the Year of the Goat .

"Say in the past we would give HK$10 bills, but now people give HK$20, so it seems like it has doubled but it has not happened in just one year. It all depends on personal finances," he said, adding that he gave up to HK$500 to some close relatives.

This article appeared in the South China Morning Post print edition as: Banks get note presses running to meet lai see demand for holidays
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