Hong Kong dollar

This started out as a shopping tip. It got too long. So, shopping tip to follow.

The Hong Kong dollar has been pegged to the US dollar since October 1983. The rate? One US dollar will buy you HK$7.80. But why the peg? In the autumn of 1983, the wealthy realised Hong Kong was going to be handed back to mainland China in 1997. Panic ensued. There was a mass exodus of money. The currency collapsed. To restore some semblance of confidence, the then British colonial government set a fixed exchange rate. It did the trick: the exit of money slowed down; even as the mass exodus of people began. Anyway, the peg has been in place ever since. Which is fortunate: during the 1997-98 Asian financial meltdown, only the pegged Hong Kong dollar, at great financial cost, avoided the wave of huge devaluations that hit other Asian currencies and which subsequently impoverished millions of people. (Mainland China's yuan is also set to a fixed exchange rate, but that's a topic for another post.)
We travel, sometimes. Which almost inevitably means getting on a plane and flying. And wherever you land -- near or far -- is almost always foreign. With a different currency. Most of what we eat, drink, wear, most everything we consume here is imported. Vegetables, pork and sundry other items come in across the border from China. But most everything else comes in from much further afield. Because the HK dollar is in lockstep with the US dollar, how the US dollar is doing impacts on many local consumer prices. It impacts on travel, trading, buying and selling. It impacts on whether you put your savings into any one of a number of currencies the local banks offer plans for. So we tend to be somewhat knowledgeable about currencies and sensitive to their fluctuations and trends. And the US dollar has been doing real bad these past 12 months or more in relation to other significant currencies. Down 30 percent against the Euro. Down 15 percent against British sterling. That's quite a lot of chump change.