Peter Wong: A steady hand in a crisis

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Fifty years of Asia The profiles: 23 of the biggest names in Asia Zafrul Aziz Laura Cha Wei Sun Christianson Piyush Gupta Uday Kotak Reuben Lai Boon Chye Loh Agus Martowardojo Raghuram Rajan Jahja Setiaatmadja Weijian Shan Alan Smith Teh Hong Piow Tian Huiyu Sun Yu Nestor Tan Wee Ee Cheong Kartika Wirjoatmodjo Daniel Wu Wu Wei Joseph Yam Zeti Akhtar Aziz

“If there’s one thing I have learned in my career it is how to deal with a crisis because I have lived through so many of them,” says Peter Wong, a 40-year veteran of banking in Asia and today chief executive of Asia Pacific at HSBC.

In the early 1980s, US Fed tightening led to rising rates and a round of defaults and delinquencies in Hong Kong. In September 1983, Black Saturday saw a collapse of the Hong Kong dollar because of uncertainties about the future of Hong Kong and the Sino-British agreement, which a month later led to the HK dollar being pegged to the US dollar. Then there was the 1987 global stock market crash.