If someone tells you that my house is full of cash lately, it really bothers me. I think most people’s first reaction is that this must be the Versailles pretensions of people with mines at home set, who doesn’t want this kind of trouble?
In fact, you really do not want.
Chief Executive Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor was recently interviewed by the Hong Kong International Business Channel (HKIBC) and asked if the U.S. sanctions had inconvenienced her life, she said that because of the sanctions was cancelled by the bank, the government paid her salary entirely in cash – “I am using cash every day, buying everything, I have a lot of cash at home”.
Most Chinese people are probably not proud enough even if they convert their entire salary into mao bills. But as chief executive, Lam earns an annual salary of HK$5.21 million ($668,000), or an average of HK$434,000 a month. This salary is currently the second highest salary in global politics (the first is Singapore’s Lee Hsien Loong, with an annual salary of $1.7 million), bearing in mind that the bull-nosed president of the United States only earns $400,000 a year. Every month this figure into cash piled up at home, it is indeed possible to achieve the effect of “pile up like a mountain”.
Once we can only see a variety of modern Heshen on TV, because the fear of the source of the huge amount of property found everywhere to hide money, and even burned the money machine feat, did not expect a normal salary of the Hong Kong government cadres, there are also times like this.
Although counting money until your hands are soft is the dream of most people like us who have no talent and drink bottles of yogurt to lick the lid clean, but in fact in today’s era of electronic settlement and wireless payment, this will become a life of torture. When you want to buy a Hermes, obviously a dazzling wave of a credit card can be completed, but now you must be like a woman shopping in the market, with a bag enough to hold hundreds of thousands of cash; want to buy a car to buy a house, you can only use the bank to pay a lump sum of money – a living sense of Shanxi coal boss consumption. It is expected to be used to see the world’s Miss Guides despise – you mainland, right? No, I am the Chief Executive ……
This picture is too incongruous.
In fact, it can be imagined that only cash transactions for personal daily consumption, money transfer, financial management, insurance, settlement and even travel, etc. will bring great trouble. In a highly developed financial society, the absence of a bank account actually means a complete decoupling from the various functions of modern finance. To take the simplest example, whether Lin Zheng is using an Apple or Android phone, she cannot use most of the functions other than calls – because she cannot hook up any payment function. Any activities that need to be settled through Internet banking, from buying tickets, online shopping, to investment, financial management, can not participate in …… Even if in the future Lin Zheng wants to retire out of Hong Kong, it is likely to find that nowhere to go – the vast majority of countries have cash entry restrictions The most important thing is that you can’t go anywhere. She is full of money at home, there is no place to go, may be more trouble than waste paper – not afraid of thieves to steal, but afraid of thieves to remember ah.
Of course, there is not no other way out. The same situation of the Hong Kong Police Force, a brother Deng Bingqiang, had to HSBC, Bank of China International loan to purchase a garden mansion, was cancelled by the bank account, the hardened Deng Bingqiang simply do not pretend to loan what bird money, directly with cash to pay off the loan – the strength is forced out of ah.
Hong Kong as the former international financial center, so many Chinese banks, the face of the U.S. empire because of the sanctions and the impact of life of patriotic cadres, actually said powerless, and foreign banks together with the fire on the other side of the river and even fall into the well, which really should be what we love to say that – no one is a man wow.
Of course, this actually can not blame the bank. We know that the financial information transfer system between financial institutions that controls more than 80% of global cross-border payments – “SWIFT” is actually a cross-border financial system based on U.S. dollar transactions. As of December 2019, SWIFT data show that the dollar’s share of global trade is 42.2%, almost equal to the euro, the pound and the yen combined. Such absolute dominance of the U.S. dollar has become a powerful tool for the U.S. to impose financial sanctions. Whenever the U.S. is determined to sanction a country or institution, it can simply cut off that financial institution’s connection to the U.S. Dollar Cross Border Settlement System (CHIPS), thus making it impossible for it to conduct any dollar-related transactions. No bank could, in fact, withstand such sanctions.
One might say, well, one can open an account in the name of a family member. That would be naive. The abominable thing about the U.S. empire is that it does not speak of martial virtue, and sanctions are imposed on immediate family members, including husbands, wives and children – the fundamental reason why Lam’s son gave up his doctoral studies in the U.S. and was forced to return. Not only that, if any of your friends want to do you a favor, once it is found, will also be sanctioned by association ……
When Lin Zheng was first sanctioned, he once said dismissively that he had neither assets in the U.S. nor any need to go to the U.S. and would not worry about it. Jeremy Paner, a former official of the U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, once told the media that outsiders often underestimate the effectiveness of U.S. sanctions, believing that they are not affected because they have no assets in the United States. In fact, because of the dollar hegemony of the global financial links, even if you do not worry about the U.S. empire, the U.S. empire of all evil but affect you all the time na.
Last week after Lam Cheng read out this year’s Policy Address, a media poll was conducted, and the current dissatisfaction rate of the public was as high as 64%, the most negative poll since 1999. But she said forcefully, “I have regained my confidence, and the old me is back.” “It is very honorable to be unreasonably sanctioned by the United States. It’s an honor.”
In an interview with the South China Morning Post, she said, “I don’t feel guilty, what did I do wrong?”
This is a question that we can call the “Question of Lam Cheng.” On December 7, the U.S. empire added a long list of heavyweight sanctions to its new list – the third but probably not the last batch of the U.S. empire’s list for the Hong Kong-related bills. On the same day, Congress voted unanimously on a new bill that would provide “temporary protected status” for Hong Kong residents in the United States, significantly lowering the threshold for legal detention and work permits in the United States. Across the ocean, the United Kingdom is also speeding up the wholesale of BNO (Overseas National) passports for Hong Kong people at an unprecedented rate of one in five minutes.
So the “question of Lam Cheng” may become a long lingering nightmare with no answer.
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