金融風暴對香港的影響

During Asian Financial crisis, HK properties market collapsed. Many HK people default as they bought houses which value dropped significantly to a level that the market value of them became lower than the outstanding loans (negative net assets value). However, the economy was in recession, many people could not find a job or even though some had occupations, their salaries were greatly cut that they could not longer afford to pay the monthly instalments on mortgage loans to the banks. They sold the flats, but as they had negative net assets value, the home owners would need to pay the difference in amount to the banks, otherwise, they default. Hence, there were many bank-owned flats in the markets during 1998 - 2005. Moreover, this trend was intensified as many investors on housing market bought many flats in order to make money but as the market collapsed, they could not afford to repay the debt and default. This event had negative impact on the whole economy: recession, deflation and poor morale in the community.

The reasons for this occurence are that as HK dollar was pegged to USD, HK government could not depreciate HKD and lower interest rate to help the economy, therefore, assets value dropped in order to compensate the strong HKD, maintaining the nominal value unchanged.