Do you have US$1.32 trillion? Let's use some of it to lure Tiger

Forget this media gig, I am a definitely in the wrong business. Wealth management is really where it's at. Someone else makes lots of money and I manage it for them, for a huge fee of course.

You don't find many better jobs than that and I guess you could say I had an epiphany of sorts this week as I was sitting at a press conference for the UBS Hong Kong Open, high above our polluted city in an auditorium that was part of the sponsor's sprawling offices.

Now here is a company which has very generously signed on to be the title sponsor of the Hong Kong Open for four years and has already gone about raising the purse money and will continue to do so. They have every intention of making this an event, as opposed to a tournament. They run a top-drawer hospitality centre, seem rather accommodating and have a charming and genuine regional chief executive in Kathryn Shih, who debunks the notion that big shots in Swiss private banks have to be boring and inaccessible.

And they also have US$1.32 trillion in assets under management. That's right, UBS could buy South America if it wanted to and still have enough coin left over to scoop up Africa. But that would be a bad investment and you don't become the biggest private bank in the world by making bad investments. You become the biggest private bank in the world by spending other people's money very wisely and this past week I saw first-hand how this works.

Because the UBS Hong Kong Open has been deemed a 'major event' on our sporting calendar, it qualifies for funding from the government's Major Sports Event Committee, which was set up in October 2003 to advise the government on initiatives for the promotion of major sports events in Hong Kong.

As an 'M Mark event', the Open received HK$3 million last year, HK$2 million this year and will get HK$1 million in 2008. Among the criteria to qualify for an 'M Mark Event' is that it will bring people to Hong Kong and, presumably, fill up the hotel rooms, as well as dining and drinking establishments, which makes sense in the case of the Hong Kong Sevens.

And there is nothing wrong with the government throwing some money into the pot here to help these events, considering how readily they waste our money on far less noble pursuits. This funding is also crucial because the hackneyed government public relations folk insist on dubbing Hong Kong the 'Events Capital of Asia'.