You may have noticed a story in this newspaper the other day crowing at how Hong Kong has now pipped Taiwan to become the world's third-largest holder of foreign reserves with US$107.5 billion in the kitty.
Yeah, yeah, yeah and what, you may well ask, are we doing sticking yet more money into United States Treasuries that are now yielding less than 6 per cent when we could have invested it in clean water or waste disposal, leave alone bigger flats than the shoeboxes in which we live?
For an international beauty contest let us instead have Margarine Wong running for Miss World, a better giggle any day and infinitely more useful to us than the proof in these huge foreign reserves that we are indeed running some acute imbalances in our economy.
Make it a beauty contest, however. Here is how you get Hong Kong to No 1 spot and by such a wide margin that other contestants will be ashamed even to show up on stage afterwards.
We shall start with a common misapprehension. You may think that 'foreign reserve' represents our net public savings, attributable to each and every one of us in equal measure.
It is not so. Leave alone that it disregards domestic currency reserves, it ignores the fact that a good deal of the money comes from private entities and they retain their rights to it. We have to make some deductions from those total assets of HK$985 billion held by the Exchange Fund.
First, take out about HK$93 billion in certificates of indebtedness, a fancy name for the backing of the banknote issue. The banknotes in your wallet belong to you alone. Then take out HK$114 billion in Exchange Fund bills and notes. The banks hold those notes and they want the money back as well as another HK$73 billion they and others have placed with the fund.