Today's market closing proved that the index closed on sept18 is not the bottom la! Still some ways to go. Could you imagine that HSI could go down as low as 12000? I don't intend to spread around rumours, it's just my 6 cents, a wild guess.
Anyway, the turmoil happened in 1997/98 was fundamentally very different than the turmoil this year. The turmoil we are now facing is far more "contagious", it spreads across the gigantic banks/financial institutions, the hedge funds, the fund house, the insurances, then spreading to the business sectors where firms are facing the difficulty of getting loans, guarantees, weak consumer demand, then ppl losing jobs, then bad debt on cards, mortgages etc......... And all these happened everywhere in the world, not just confined to asia as in 97/98. Remember the time in 97/98, it was really bad in HK, but in US, their stock market was still performing well.
So this credit crunch is really crunching the finance/bank sectors that is the core of every country's economy.
So you heard in last week that some well known Bankers in HK (e.g. Peter Wxxx, Or Ching Fxx), mentioned that this time of the year is the worst they ever seen in their career.
Not far from 12,000 la. An analyst from a china bank in HK said some predicted HSI fall to 11,000 which is 7.0 PE ratio. He even said he can't eliminate that HSI could go further down to 5.x PE ratio as this is a century financial disaster ever since 193x great depression.