HONG KONG, OCT 22: Wary investors are moving money out of Asian countries seen as ill-prepared for the Y2K millennium bug, an expert at Warburg Dillon Read said on Friday. Economies perceived to be better prepared, such as Hong Kong and Singapore, stand most to gain, Sean Debow, head of regional valuation and accounting research told Reuters in an interview."Clearly, funds are moving out of Indonesia, India, Thailand and China on account of Y2K," the millennium bug expert said. "Money that is Asia-specific, and that is a large portion of funds that is invested in Asia - we believe that money has already started to move to Singapore and Hong Kong."
Apart from a strong driving force to avoid risks, Debow said the reallocation of particularly US-based funds was also due to the US Employee Retirement Income Security Act, whose high standards placed restrictions on large investors holding Asian stocks with high millennium risk exposure.
The Y2K bug stems from an old programming practice of using only twodigits to denote the year. Older computers could mistake 2000 for 1900 and crash at the start of the new year.
Copyright © 1999 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.
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