Читать книгу Financial Cold War. A View of Sino-US Relations from the Financial Markets онлайн

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is Available:

ISBN 978-1-119-86276-5 (hardback)

ISBN 978-1-119-86278-9 (ePub)

ISBN 978-1-119-86277-2 (ePDF)

Cover Design: Wiley

Cover Image: © suns07butterfly/Shutterstock

For Peter & Harry

Among my earliest memories was a visit to a stockbroker's office with my father. Growing up in Hong Kong, every Chinese New Year children would receive ‘red packets' containing small sums of money from relatives and family friends. Each year, my father would gather up the haul that my siblings and I had collected to invest in stocks. In the go-go years of Hong Kong in the 1980s, people from all walks of life seemed to hang on every fluctuation of the stock market. Although I had very little knowledge of financial markets back then, I suppose I was instilled early in life with a sense of their power.

Later, as a teenager, I struggled with my studies in classical Chinese texts. Taking pity on me, my godmother offered to tutor me, and I started going up to her office twice a week for tutorials. Auntie Sue – as she is known to me – was a successful lawyer who had co-founded a law firm with my father. However, by that stage she had become a little bored of the law and had taken up a side-line in trading stock options. I found Confucian and Mencian philosophy rather tedious and often diverted these tutorial sessions to discussions on stocks and options trading. Over time, Auntie Sue taught me the basic principles of securities valuation and options pricing that, as an adolescent with dreams of riches, I absorbed with enthusiasm.