Could Taiwan take over from HK as a new financial centre? (2019 edition)

Business Money
21

Who cares about being a financial center. Finance is a zero sum game. Engineering is a positive sum game.

22

Who cares about anything? :idunno:

Oh right, people care. Because reasons. :whistle:

23

As long as our capital markets are modern enough to support our tech sector, thatā€™s fine.

24

What if an international bank built a platform which opened those capital markets up to a wider investor base?

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25

hahahahahahah

oh waitā€¦ youā€™re serious

26

Not fine for retail banking and few opps to grow jobs and investment in financial sector right now.

27

@CTaitung I think a twelve year old may have accessed your account. You may want to change your password.

28

Taiwan financial centre? Maybe if they let people open an account and not having to go to the bank whenever they receive some moneyā€¦

29

Are you guys forgetting the crime and money laundering here? Banking here is messed up for many reasons, but certainly the biggest is due to corruption and massive amounts of money being ā€œlegitimizedā€. If taiean opened up like that it would be a massive disaster. They need to shape up for a few years and take care of these issue before anything like this could work.

We are not Singapore. Singapore is Chinas dirty little lawyer while taiwan is like Chinas ex wife fighting for custody. Many countries need singapore to make their illegal stuff transfer into legal stuff. Due to the china beef, taiwan cant play that game internationally.

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30

Doubt it, I work in the Finance field with a big portion of my work involving other countries in Asia. Taiwan is nowhere near as open for foreign investment as others like HK or SG. Itā€™s still rather backwards.

31

Can we add quotation marks to the title of this thread?

ā€œTaiwan could take over from HK as a new financial centreā€ (2019 edition)

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32

The title should be 'Taiwan could never take over from HK as a new Financial Center '.

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33

Taiwan banks with their 1980s level service being world class overnight? Haha haha.
Singapore is still laughing

Hell, AGong can still being in a massive bag of taxman hidden money into the bank and deposit it no questions asked. In a freakin sack no less.

Compare that to modern banks and economies in various other places that have gone mostly cash free. No wonder Taiwan has massive tax evasion issues.

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34

I think itā€™s not much different in HK or Singapore.

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35

I thought the original optimistic title would lure all the Taiwan banking haters in here to set things straight :slight_smile:.

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36

When I first got my account here, they asked for my mobile number and I gave it to them on the form with the full international prefix. This is how numbers were captured at my bank in my home country where not all customers were domestic, then, clearly they could contact you overseas this way if something happened, you know, suspicious activity, overdraft these sort of things. Most people travelled internationally for holidays there, and that is often when things can go awry.

Anyway after filling out my Taiwan mobile with international prefix on the account application form, I got a call a couple of days later from the bank (paper form, manually processed lol). It was one of the staff, who in a very patronising tone explained that as we all live in Taiwan, we donā€™t need to use the international prefix.

37

I wish I had taken a video back in the day when I had a company here. The number of stamps and IDs I had to carry around ā€¦

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38

Iā€™ve noticed taxes and tax regulation have been tightened up considerably since I first got here. The taxman pretty much knows when you buy a cup of bubble tea.

OTOH, I reckon the ease of tax evasion is precisely why Taiwan is still relatively successful. Heavy taxation - especially when it isnā€™t accompanied by competent government services - has almost exactly the same effect as rampant corruption. Taiwan does comparatively well in terms of government services considering its modest tax take (as a proportion of GNI).

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39

Itā€™s still very easy to hide money here. Iā€™m not complaining though. Thatā€™s a good thing. Iā€™d go into more detail, but the mods here have a hard-on against helping others skirt the laws on this forum.

No foreign enterprises would invest heavily in Taiwan now because what is happening in HK will eventually happen here. There are much better place on invest.

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40

Why not leave the title as the OP presented it and let the conversation evolve? Editing it takes away from the original intent.

Editing later on confuses the discussion and ultimately leads to a clusterphuck