Did you know that HSBC prints HK notes?

I didn't know that. I always thought it was the "Bank of Hong Kong" or the "Monetary Authority of Hong Kong" or some Govt organisation/authority that printed the notes. Today though, I got a chance to see a 10,20 and 50 denominated HKD.

"Why are there Lions on all of them?" I asked.

"Oh, because these are HSBC notes." was the reply I got.

"HSBC notes? they print notes??"

"Yes."

"WHAT?!?! they really print notes? thats amazing! its like the government of HK then!"

"Yeah, I suppose."

-- at this point i was really stunned. I am imagining myself being the Chair of HSBC and ordering them to print a million, HECK, a trillion HKD and then declare the bank as having a profit of a trillion. my bonus will be FAT... ---

"so are there any other banks that print notes in HK?"

"yup, there are three, HSBC, Bank of China and Standard Chartered"

!!!

At once I made a mental note to blog this down and share this new exciting information with you all.

"So, do they all look different?"

"Yes, they are all different." he looks through his bag of notes to find an example, but he doesn't have any non HSBC HKD.

----

but now back home, i did a bit of research on the web (amazing isn't it, the net?) and found out that the three banks are called Note Issuing Banks. They have some agreement with the Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA), and under some fixed exchange rate policy, they can redeem or issue HKD at the price of 1 USD for 7.8 HKD... So unfortunately, there's no free money here..

But the hard peg sounds a bit dodgy, and another look on the web tells me that that policy was true before May 2005, but it has been recently unpegged from the USD.. hmm.. why don't somebody explain that?