Substantial progress in HK gold hub push: Hui

Financial Services and the Treasury Secretary Christopher Hui on Thursday said Hong Kong had made substantial progress in becoming a global gold trading centre — and more is still to come. Speaking on RTHK's Backchat programme, Hui said a clearing system had been trial operating since July and has already seen a large amount of gold deposited. By the end of the year, he added, HKEX will announce details of renminbi (RMB) gold futures, with the clearing system to be formally launched in the first quarter of next year. Hui said the goal is to combine the strengths of the world's three existing gold trading hubs — the UK, the US and Switzerland — into a single platform. "What we hope to achieve is with this change in geopolitics and also with the growing desire for investors to diversify, they can within the Asia time zone find these three functions together in Hong Kong," he said. "We have storage with clearing, at the same time we have futures traded here and also we have refinery. And that's exactly what we are aiming at in our overall gold development plan." On the internationalisation of the RMB, Hui said Hong Kong had been continuously...